


Chasing After Peace

by miserygrave



Category: Naruto
Genre: Codependency, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2020-06-03 11:33:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 46,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19463119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miserygrave/pseuds/miserygrave
Summary: Kaguya is known as God for a reason. During the final confrontation, she casts Team 7 and Obito into the Infinite Tsukuyomi, but Uzumaki Naruto isn't known as the most unpredictable ninja for nothing. Breaking free and surviving by the skin of his teeth, Kaguya is the one who blinks first.Now Naruto and Obito as the sole survivors spiral into the past, trying to build a peaceful world and avoid Kaguya's rebirth. Along the way, two fractured hearts find solace in one another.





	1. In God's Eye

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well here's my next big project - I have a decently clear idea of where I want to go with this story, so I hope whoever reads this enjoys it! It will feature a growing romance between Naruto and Obito, although a large focus will be on world building and characters. I'm trying to keep characters from going too OOC but it may be inevitable.
> 
> Future chapters may have special warnings or notes that aren't in the tags so be forewarned.
> 
> Comments are always appreciated!

The moon is still red, peering down balefully at the last dregs of humanity, carefully watching over the Shinju - the God Tree. The wind hums and groans around the boughs of it, curling around the thousands of bodies wrapped up in endless dreams. How many of them have already become White Zetsu?

The tree is there, mighty and terrifying, but God is gone. Her oppressing chakra echoes in her absence, making the skin on the back of Obito’s neck crawl with the sensation of being watched.

_Where is she…?_

From his dimension, Obito brings out Kakashi’s body, still warm and oozing blood, and Sakura, barely clinging to life. He rests them next to Sasuke’s corpse. He supposes that despite everything, these members of Team 7 should pass into the next life together.

Naruto is kneeling a few metres away, head angled up towards the sky and palms open. It’s the perfect image of utter defeat, and just looking at it makes Obito’s chest hurt with familiarity. Suddenly it doesn’t feel quite so long ago that he’d been in that same pose, holding Rin’s body in the rain. Now Obito wants to hold him. His arms ache to reach out and soothe him, to comfort him. He steps towards the blond and notices that the hole in his chest is healed over somehow. Obito looks to where the Kyuubi had been and sees the cracked open remnants of Kaguya’s Chibaku Tensei.

“So, it’s been resealed,” Obito muses to himself. “For what purpose…?”

Kaguya had wanted Sasuke and Naruto’s chakra for herself. What did she gain by reverting Naruto into a jinchuuriki? He’d been on the verge of death without the Kyuubi, not to mention the wound inflicted on him by Sasuke. His chakra would have been easy to seize at that moment, but now he’s alive and his soul is completely intact. It feels wrong. Like a trap.

“Naruto?” Obito calls softly, stepping around him and kneeling down to be face to face.

There’s no response, not that Obito had really expected one. Naruto doesn’t even blink as Obito cups his face in his hands and angles it back down to earth, breaking his line of sight with the red moon above.

“It’s bad again,” Obito grimaces. “What did she do to you…?”

She’d had nearly five minutes alone with him as Obito had desperately attended to Kakashi and Sakura in his dimension, fruitlessly trying to save their lives. Kakashi had been a forgone conclusion, he has to admit, but it had hurt anyways when he’d rattled out his last breath in a weak apology.

_“Sorry, Obito. I’ll wait for you… on the other side.”_

… Obito clenches his jaw. This isn’t the time to think about that.

He hadn’t had the medical experience to save Sakura, either. The med-nin had exhausted all of the chakra inside of the yin seal on her forehead with the use of her Strength of One Hundred after the last mortal blow Sasuke had landed on her, and yet she had pushed beyond both blood loss and Chakra exhaustion. Looking at her, he sees the same diamond-hard will inside that had also lived inside of Rin. It's hard to watch her slowly pale. Only the force of her will is still keeping her heart beating, but he knows that very soon she too will pass beyond the veil.

He looks at Naruto’s blank eyes. Five minutes. To someone with a fully matured Sharingan - to say nothing of the Rinne-Sharingan - five minutes can last forever, and he’s experienced first hand the sort of vile imagination Kaguya has inside of a genjutsu.

Naruto’s skin is so pale that it nearly matches the false skin of his right side. The blood loss from his chest wound hasn’t recovered completely just yet, it seems. Obito trails a hand down and pulls up the edge of his shirt. There’s a seal there, one he’s never seen before. It looks like Kaguya’s eye, three rings marked with tomoe inked in black on Naruto’s stomach. He half expects the tomoe to begin swirling. His neck prickles again, shivers cascading all the way down his spine.

_Someone’s watching him._

He tears his eyes away from the seal and shakes off the feeling. “... I’m going to come inside now, Naruto,” Obito says aloud, but it’s mostly for the Kyuubi’s benefit. The last thing he truly wants to do now is have the bijuu kick up a fuss inside of Naruto’s mind and potentially damage it even more.

His eyes ache softly as they morph into the Mangekyou and he slips inside of Naruto’s mindscape.

It’s dark and cold inside, and the smell of iron - _blood_ \- is so strong that his stomach turns. He pauses there for a moment, breathing slowly through his mouth, letting his eyes adjust to the unnatural darkness.

The water sloshing around his ankles is murky and bloody and icy. A piece of paper flutters by his head and he watches as it lands in the red water and is submerged. The sounds of shuffling paper from above alerts him and he steps out of the way as a cabinet’s worth of files and books come falling out from a doorway above him. The hinges on the door are broken, and the door hangs off the wall, bent awkwardly as it waves slightly in the air. As he walks down the hallway towards the core of the mindspace, he finds more doors. They’re all broken, leaking their contents all over the ground, sinking into the water and disappearing. He spies a metal name-tag above one of the doors. _Senjutsu._ Above another is _Pranks_.

_So these are the rooms where he keeps his memories. His knowledge._

The knowledge Naruto had carefully accumulated and tucked away inside of his mind, torn apart as if - Obito slams a hand into the wall in realization and a small cascade of scrolls tumble out of the wall behind him. _Torn apart_ as if someone had been searching for something. Kaguya had meticulously peeled every door open and looked inside. What had she been looking for? He walks by a door labelled _Every Team Lunch_ and is shaken out of his thoughts.

There isn’t any time to waste. He needs to find Naruto and the Kyuubi _now_. With the Kyuubi’s chakra, Sakura could be saved.

He runs towards the centre of the mindscape, following the pull of Naruto’s soul down a complex maze of pathways and broken doors. Somewhere far away he can hear the rushing sound of a waterfall, and he pushes himself to go faster. The roaring sound of water gets louder and as he runs, he watches the walls of Naruto’s mind become more cracked and eroded.

Obito comes to a stop at the edge of the maze.

As though someone had reached in a scooped it out with their hand, there’s a huge cavern where there shouldn’t be. The walls and doors have completely collapsed and the water is pouring off the side, dragging sodden books and scrolls with it into the pit below.

Most frighteningly, in the space where Naruto’s mind once was, in this cavern that had been scraped out of his very soul, a door unlike the others rests in the middle. A door as large as a bijuu, blood red and patterned with rings and tomoe. His instincts scream at him to stay away, that something vile and evil lay created this place, but the Kyuubi and Naruto are standing just before it and so he descends.

The Kyuubi is the one that turns to look at him. “Uchiha scum,” it snarls, “what do you want?”

Obito ignores it. “Naruto, I did as you wanted. I took Kakashi and Sakura into my Kamui dimension when it was safe.”

Naruto doesn’t look at him, or even give any indication of having heard him. He just stares blankly up at the giant red door. He might not even be breathing. Sakura was the one who had gotten through to him the last time he was like this, within the dream. Without her, what can Obito do? He doesn’t fix things. His hands are soaked in blood and meant for killing.

“Kakashi died,” Obito informs bluntly, and perhaps somewhat cruelly, but he needs Naruto to still be _there_ with him and he hopes a shock like that would be enough to get through to him.

When they had still been enemies, Naruto had fought hard to keep Kakashi safe and alive - even during this escape plan, Naruto had planned to have Kakashi and Sakura stay back and safe inside of the Kamui dimension with Obito while he fought alone… That plan didn’t survive contact with the enemy, but the thought remains. Kakashi’s death would hurt Naruto just as deeply as it hurt him, if not more, and it _has_ to be enough to break through the haze.

Naruto doesn’t react.

Obito huffs out a slightly hysterical laugh and collapses down into the bloody water. Perhaps he can just stay inside of Naruto’s mind until he dies. There’s nothing left on the outside except for White Zetsu and rotting corpses. At least in here he could die with a shadow of the man he had chosen to pin his life on. It feels fitting in a twisted way. The child he’d orphaned, who he’d slated for a miserable death the instant the boy had become a jinchuuriki, whose life had been forever troubled and marked thanks to his own selfish actions… That child had opened his eyes and had become his pillar of strength. And now, thanks to the seeds of war he had carefully sown, that warm light that forgave him and welcomed him in from the cold has been crushed.

Dying alone and soaked with blood, accompanied by a demon that despises him - that is the only suitable end of a life like his. He giggles manically, hands clawing at the sides of his head.

_Rin… Sensei… Kakashi… Naruto and I will be with you soon._

The Kyuubi eyes him with something approaching pity and it settles itself carefully onto its side, tails swaying above his head.

“So,” Obito drawls, copying the bijuu and splaying himself out on some rubble, trying to get himself comfortable. No point in waiting for death in discomfort. “What does this door do?”

He doesn’t particularly expect the Kyuubi to respond. After all, he is an ‘accursed’ Uchiha, and that’s not even mentioning the fact he had been one so insolent as to take control of the bijuu’s actions that night so very long ago now. He’s mildly surprised when he sees the Kyuubi’s mouth open to speak -

“She put it here.”

Obito feels less bad about his full bodied jerk when the ground rumbles from the Kyuubi suddenly jumping in its skin as well. He leaps up and pulls Naruto into a tight embrace, burying his face in the blonde spikes of hair, one hand tugging Naruto’s head down into the crook of his neck and shoulder and the other desperately clasping around his back. His eyes burn with the desire to cry in relief. He’s not alone. Naruto didn’t leave him behind.

Naruto slowly returns the hug. “Did Kakashi really die?” he asks, lips whispering against Obito’s collarbone.

Obito tries to force words past his throat but they catch like hooks, and before he can stop himself he begins to cry pitifully in the embrace.

After a few long moments of Obito’s tears, Naruto solemnly asks, “Did Sakura die too?”

Obito shakes his head and takes a shuddery breath. “No, but… She will soon.”

Naruto reaches up and pats Obito’s head, fingers running through his hair and massaging little circles into his scalp. “It’s okay,” he promises quietly with a small quirk of his lips that Obito feels against his shoulder. “It’s all going to be okay now.”

Obito feels his entire body relax in relief although his face warms with how childish he feels. Simply being told that, in a tone of voice so full of blunt determination without a hint of doubt, it feels like perhaps everything _will_ be alright, like a frightened boy being told by his father that there truly wasn’t a monster hiding in the closet. It’s enough to keep believing in this man who always accomplishes the impossible. The one who had shed light into his world again. The one with such an open and bleeding heart that he’ll comfort Obito first even when he’s suffering too.

For a split second, he’s filled with a jealous rage that Madara had stolen him away and twisted his head up into something ugly and hateful, and that Kakashi had had the chance to become something precious to Naruto thanks to _Obito’s_ sacrifice. If it hadn’t been for them, he could have returned to Konoha; he could have helped this child grow; _he_ could have been the one to love and be loved by him.

 _It’s not fair,_ he thinks wildly. _It’s not fair!_

“Naruto,” the Kyuubi rumbles, the low growl vibrating in Obito’s chest and cutting into his silent rage, “what do you want to do now?”

Naruto gently disengages from the embrace so he can turn and look at the Kyuubi, but one of his hands rests itself on the back of Obito’s neck as a warm, welcome weight, the soft pressure of it nudging Obito’s self back into shape, the blinding jealousy and hatred being dulled and pushed into the dark corners at the edge of his mind.

“Kurama... “ Naruto tilts his head, free hand coming up in a fist. The Kyuubi responds in kind, carefully bringing its own fist forward to meet it. They look at each other for a minute before the Kyuubi’s eyes narrow and flicker to the door.

“Truly?” it asks in disbelief.

“Yeah,” Naruto nods, hand tightening ever-so-slightly around the back of Obito’s neck. In response, he turns and curls himself into Naruto’s side. If he can provide even a modicum of comfort, he’ll be satisfied. He wasn’t there for sixteen long years, but he is _now_. “I know it seems crazy but… That’s what she made it for.”

The Kyuubi’s tails come forward, resting around them in a cage of warmth. “I understand, my partner. You don’t need to say anything more.” The Kyuubi laughs, the booming sound echoing around the vast chamber. “She’s willing to bet against your insane luck? My father’s mother is gutsier than I’d thought.”

Obito’s brow furrows in confusion, unable to quite follow their discussion. Kaguya had searched Naruto’s mind for something… When she’d found it, whatever it was, she had made room to create this doorway and she now wants Naruto to go through it.

“Where does the door lead to?”

Naruto startles and then looks sheepish, as if he’d somehow forgotten altogether that Obito was even there and he pouts at that. “Hehe… Um… Well, she said it connects to a point in the past. When the door opens on the other side, the entire world will be reverted to that state.”

Obito opens his mouth and then closes it. He repeats that action a few more times. Finally he settles on, “I see.”

“Yeah, so…” Naruto trails off awkwardly, shrugging in their half-embrace, thumb rubbing along the back of Obito’s neck in soothing little patterns. “I’m gonna open it, I guess.”

Obito hums in acquiescence, lulled by Naruto’s gentle touch, before his brain finally computes. “Wait a moment. You’re going to _what?_ What if it’s a trick? What if this door takes you back into the Infinite Tsukuyomi?”

“I really don’t think it will. I mean, she could just force me, like she did before. But even if… it takes me back there…” Naruto’s eyes all but glow with determination. “Even if I die… _You’ll_ still be here. You can still find another way to win! I believe in you.”

A bright cut of worry and terror strikes him and his heart pounds painfully in his chest. Is Naruto really going to abandon him here while he goes through this cursed doorway, to only God knows where? To only God knows _when?_ “What point in time did she say it will lead you to?”

Naruto shrugs unhelpfully.

He grits his teeth. “What if you don’t have enough time? What if she still wins? No. You can’t do this. Come out of here now.”

“Oi, oi,” Naruto complains goodnaturedly, poking a finger into Obito’s chest. “Even if it’s only one day - that’s enough. All we need is just that little bit, before she comes back. And even if it’s _not_ enough… At least I can say that I tried. We can’t give up this opportunity, even if it will end in tears all over again. Obito… It will be _okay_. I promise, ‘ttebayo.”

“ _No,_ ” Obito stresses. For as silver of a tongue he had trained himself to have since Madara had taken him under his wing, a tongue so soft and serpentine that he could turn blood into wine, he finds it blunted and dead in his mouth now as he struggles to argue against this suicidal plan. He glances up at the Kyuubi, irrationally hoping that the giant beast would take his side, but it glares at him and shakes its head very slightly. He’s alone in this, too. Why can’t Naruto see how dangerous this is? How much it will hurt if it doesn’t work?

Naruto looks at him with keen, intelligent eyes that remind him very much of Minato-sensei with how sharply they cut him right down to his core. “I’ll save you again. Don’t worry. I won’t leave you behind in the darkness.”

Obito’s breath punches out of his chest. _But you are,_ he thinks, and his eyes burn with hot tears again. He curls his hands around Naruto’s shoulders. They seem so slim in his hands. Far too thin and small for the burden he carries.

To him, Naruto has become Atlas holding up the world.

Mania settles in his bones. Naruto’s death would signal the true end of the world to him. Obito had been willing to let his mind waste away into nothing here when Naruto had only been catatonic. If he _died?_ Obito would have nothing left. There may very well still be some people who are not totally converted into White Zetsu - but they don’t matter. Nothing at all matters except for the precious thing in his hands. He won’t be left behind. He refuses.

After all, the Uchiha always did feel love far too strongly.

Naruto’s sharp expression softens at the desperation in his expression. “You’re such a stubborn guy, ya know?” He sighs dramatically but his mouth ticks up into a fond smile that looks as sweet as honey. Obito takes care to allow his Sharingan to imprint it into his brain. “Well, then I guess we can go through it together! Eh, Kurama? Whaddya think?”

The tips of the Kyuubi’s tails flicker in annoyance and it grimaces. “... There is no saying if any of this is possible, and I am quite loathe to have an Uchiha accompany me _anywhere_. However, if this is your desire, I am not wholly opposed.”

“There ya have it,” Naruto grins easily. “Whether it’s a trap or not, let’s go together.”

And Obito feels like he can breathe again.

Obito lays a hand on Naruto’s shoulder and the Kyuubi curls a massive tail to touch them both. Naruto splays his hands out on the giant door and pushes. It gives way and opens to blinding light.

* * *

Awareness trickles slowly back to him and the first thing he notices is an aching throb in his head, the blood pounding loudly in his ears. He tries to crack open his eye but it _hurts_. He curls onto his side - he’s on the ground? Where is he? It doesn’t feel dry, like the arid land where the Shinju had grown; it’s softer, wetter. The moisture on the ground leaches through his clothing and chills his skin. Internally, his chakra fluctuates wildly and his entire body feels thrumming with energy.

He lies there for a long while, meditating from his position on the ground. There’s no one around him - he’s alone, wherever he is. His chakra calms eventually, and his headache slowly abates. He opens his eyes and finds his vision obscured. His hand flies up to his face and touches something hard. He traces the edge of his jaw and pulls it free. It’s a mask, orange and swirled with only one eye hole.

_Did it… actually work? Am I truly in the past, or is this just another dream?_

Struggling to sit up, he notes the dense fog around him. Kirigakure, perhaps. He supposes he should feel lucky that he hadn’t appeared and collapsed in front of Nagato. Whether this is a trick by the Infinite Tsukuyomi or not, he won’t find out by just sitting around.

Konoha is a long, hard run from here even with Kamui. There isn’t even a second he can waste here in the Bloody Mist. He has to go to Naruto.

* * *

Birds chirp in the early morning outside, their songs flittering in through the crack of his open window. The breeze is warm and he burrows further under the covers as his brain tries to split his head open with an axe, or that’s what it feels like at least. He pulls the comforter up and over himself and then dips into his mindscape. It was a little silly, since Kaguya could reach him anywhere, his mind included, but he always felt somehow safer when he was deep inside himself, sitting side by side with Kurama.

He can’t quite remember why his head hurts so much, but he doesn’t particularly want to remember either even if he has the distinct feeling he’s forgetting something very important. Kaguya came up with some rather cruel punishments if he stepped out of line, and those are memories he is quite satisfied with leaving well enough alone.

It’s dark inside. That’s normal. It’s been unnaturally dark in here since _that_ punishment, the worst one of all, the one that very nearly made him give up the struggle to escape altogether.

The water is bloody. That’s normal too. There’s only so much physical torture one can endure before their soul is soaked through with their own blood. Although he wonders if he can really call it physical torture when it all happened inside of a dream anyways.

He strolls past dilapidated walls and ransacked rooms of memories. He supposes that’s fine. He’s always been a bit scatterbrained, now it’s just a bit more literal. It’s all still in his head technically, just harder to find, more difficult to piece together. Perhaps he and Kurama can have a field day of it, picking up all the pieces and putting it back together.

When he enters the main room, he finds Kurama there waiting for him, anxiously pacing back and forth behind a - is that a cage? The cage was done away with after their tug-o-war, and they _certainly_ don’t need it now that they’re partners. Did Kaguya put it here?

“Hey, fuzzball! What the hell is this cage doing here?” Naruto demands heatedly, putting his hands on his hips just like Sakura and Tsunade-baa-chan do when they’re serious.

“Naruto!” Kurama turns sharply toward him mid-stride and exhales in relief. “So you made it.”

Naruto scrunches his brow. “Made it?”

Kurama’s tails twitch agitatedly. “Don’t you remember? You opened the doorway, and we went through. You, myself, and that accursed Uchiha brat.”

“I - We… What?” His head is hurting again. It’s so painful… What happened? What is it that he’s not remembering? Why does it hurt so badly? He hates this. He wants to hide. Kaguya must be doing something to his head again.

“Naruto -” Kurama’s voice sounds distant. “- try to relax. Just let it come over you. Don’t fight it. You don’t have to be frightened anymore. We’re somewhere very far away from the dream.”

The dream.

Things click into place with painful clarity. He woke up. He woke Sakura and Kakashi up, too. Obito and Sasuke came after them, Obito to help, and Sasuke to…

_“We’re out,” Sakura gasps, voice choked with an emotion he can’t quite place. She sounds sad, happy, and scared all at once. “Naruto, you did it!”_

_Kakashi kneels on the ground and sharply yanks his mask down to puke. Dimly Naruto remembers a time that feels like forever ago when he would’ve given his left arm to see Kakashi’s bare face, a time when he, Sakura, and Sasuke had worked together as a unit just to get a glimpse, but right now it seems almost painfully mundane._

_The moon is still red. Kaguya is somewhere, waiting in the boughs of the tree. She’ll punish him terribly for this. She’ll put him away in the darkness again, and maybe she won’t let him out this time._

_There’s splitting sound from the side as another cage of branches open and let Sasuke tumble out. Naruto wishes against all hope that Sasuke changed his mind within the last few seconds._

_“Naruto,” Sasuke greets casually. His right eye has already morphed into the Mangekyou._

_“Sasuke,” Naruto responds with a quiet voice. He feels so tired. How much of his life force did it take to pull off what he did to escape the Tsukuyomi? Kurama warms his seal comfortingly. Right. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is they’re out and they need to stay out, regroup, and come back for the rest of them._

_Sakura comes up beside him in a fighting stance. “Just back off, Sasuke,” she warns, but her voice quivers ever-so-slightly. “You can go back if you want. But we - we aren’t going back! That dream… That_ nightmare _isn’t going to keep us anymore.”_

_Kakashi slowly approaches, mask back in place. He looks unsure. Well, he was asleep soundly the whole time after all, at Obito’s request. It’s no wonder he doesn’t know what’s happening._

_Naruto lays a hand on Sakura’s shoulder. “Sakura, let me. You and Kakashi stay together.” Not that he really feels up to fighting right now._

_“Naruto, I followed you out here for a reason,” Sasuke says, slowly walking towards them. “She said I couldn’t dream any more if you weren’t there too. Both of us… That’s what she wants. It pisses me off to allow her to give me orders, but I want my family badly enough that I’ll obey her. She could just make you go back in herself… I suppose she wants me to prove myself. And I will.”_

_“I’m not going back in there. Even if I have to kill myself to get away, I’ll do it.”_

_He senses rather than sees Sakura and Kakashi’s alarm. That fatalism he’s learned inside the dream has them worried, but he doesn’t care. It’s the truth. He would obliterate himself, atomize himself, turn himself into dust and ash before he would ever allow himself to be taken back into the dream._

_Sasuke scoffs. “Then I’ll stop you before you can. I told you the whole time… Just let yourself dream peacefully. You can’t win.”_

_“Maybe so,” he admits quietly. “But I can’t give up, despite that.”_

_Sasuke almost looks sad for him._

_“Sasuke… It was you who wanted to change the world. Revolutionize the shinobi system. Did you give up on that?”_

_The system that had traumatized a thousand children, and had killed ten thousand more. The system that had allowed ROOT to grow ugly and rotten, allowed the death of an entire clan because of fear and hatred. That shinobi system that was decried by every previous Hokage. Sasuke sees it just as clearly as he does. It needs to change, and it can’t be changed within a dream._

_“Idiot,” Sasuke shoots back, sounding almost fondly exasperated. “I have given up - on humanity. Kaguya convinced me that people won’t change. It was the same back when she ate the Shinju’s fruit, it was the same during the Shodaime Hokage’s era, and it’s the same now. People just make one another suffer. This is the easiest way of fixing things. No… It’s the only way.”_

_Kaguya appears from behind him like the looming spectre of death, her long white hair flowing out behind her in a curtain. She’d look beautiful if she wasn’t so terrifying._

_“Mom… He won’t go back in, just like I said. Can’t we just kill him now?” a voice from her sleeve asks. Sasuke shoots Kaguya a nasty look._

_“No.” Before Naruto can blink, or even begin to comprehend what she’s doing, she’s at his side with her hand digging into his abdomen. “But we can expedite his return.” And without any fanfare, Kurama is torn from him yet again, violently, and she tosses the bijuu back and away from them, a Chibaku Tensei forming in her hands. “Indra, be good.”_

_Sasuke scowls at her._

_Naruto watches through unfocused eyes as the ground shatters under Kurama and hears the distant howls as he’s crushed into a ball, contained perfectly by the utter force._

_“Naruto!” Sakura shouts and he feels her hands support him as he collapses to the ground. His vision blurs more and he can barely hear her shout for Kakashi’s support._

_“If I have to kill you two to get to my dream,” Sasuke says, voice shockingly clear in the din, “then I won’t hold back.”_

_The warmth of healing chakra touches his chest as Sakura desperately tries to keep his heart beating. He tries to move his numb lips, tries to ask her just to give it up and escape, but he can’t form any words and she hushes his slurring voice._

_“Don’t talk. Just try to survive!”_

_He feels tired and warm. If only he could pass right in this instant - he’d be satisfied._

_“Kakashi-sensei and Sasuke are fighting,” she informs him. “I can’t watch too closely, but… I think that… I think - Kakashi-sensei’s going to lose.” She sniffles and grits her teeth. “Naruto, I’m going to break my vows as a medic soon. Please try to survive. I’ll come back for you, I swear.”_

_What’s taking Obito so long? He’d promised that he’d come save Sakura and Kakashi. He’d_ promised _._

_Sakura stops healing him and the coldness seeps into his bones without her chakra. “I’m going.” She smiles down at him with a brave face. “I won’t be long.”_

_He closes his eyes and tries not to smell the blood in the air that he can tell belongs to Kakashi. If this is Sakura’s last wish, for him to keep living just for a little bit longer… Maybe he can grant it. He focuses on the natural chakra in the earth, follows it into the tree. It’s soaking up every last drop. It’s a struggle to siphon any off, but he peels some back, piece by piece, scrap by scrap, until he can breathe again._

_He follows the fight through the bursts of chakra in the air. Both of them seem like glittering gems: Sasuke’s Susano’o blazing like a bright fire and Sakura’s Strength of One Hundred powering her body like a raging river. Almost swallowed by them, Kakashi’s flickering life force becomes weaker and weaker. He almost cries in relief when he feels Obito finally emerge from the tree and Kakashi’s life force disappears into his dimension. At least he’ll be safe there… Now, he has to get Sakura -_

_Her raging river drains bit by bit by bit, far too quickly. How many mortal wounds is Sasuke landing on her? The smell of her blood is coating his senses. The Strength of One Hundred dissipates and the bright gem dims. Sakura collapses, her chakra flickering and fighting to stay alive too._

_He opens his eyes and struggles to stand up, using the scraps of natural chakra he’d gathered to give him enough strength._

_Sasuke’s Susano’o is nothing but bones now; his chakra levels must be nearly depleted. They had been in the tree for awhile now, after all, and it had soaked up the largest sources first. That on top of the strain of fighting Kakashi and Sakura is enough to nearly drain him._

_“It’s just us now,” Sasuke says after a pause. Naruto fights a grim smile at that. So, he doesn’t know that Obito has left the dream too. Sasuke holds an entreating hand out to him, beckoning him. “Listen, Naruto. Just come back peacefully. The dream I had… It helped me realize some things. I’m done pretending to hate being near you. I said back at the Valley of the End that you were my closest friend. But now I realize, you’re more than that. You’ve followed me everywhere until now.” Sasuke smiles at him. It’s a handsome smile, soft and genuine, and it feels like Sasuke’s pulling his heart out of his chest. “Follow me there. You don’t have to suffer alone anymore.”_

_“Sasuke…” Hot, bitter tears run down his cheeks. Why does life have to be so painful? Why did everything have to happen this way? “I know that’s all a lie. She told you about how I feel, huh…? Or maybe it was just that obvious… It’s kinda cruel even for you to use that against me, ya know.”_

_Sasuke closes his eyes and when he reopens it, his Sharingan is deactivated and his naturally dark eye meets his. “It’s not a lie.”_

_A shaky hand reaches up and grabs at his jacket over his heart. “I see… I’m happy. But, Sasuke, I can’t follow you there.” He bows his head and laughs brokenly. “I’d follow you anywhere else. So please…”_

_The sound of a thousand chirping birds carries across the dying land._

_“You can survive a Chidori. You’ve done it before. Just enough to weaken you. For old time’s sake…” Sasuke’s eye goes red again. “And then we’ll make a new life inside of a dream together.”_

_Naruto just waits for the punch of pain through his chest. It’s so nostalgic seeing him standing across from him with the chirping ball of lightning in his hand. He’ll let the attack hit - not that he could run anyway. He doesn’t bother mentioning the fact that he only survived thanks to Kurama, and that without him he’ll bleed out in a few seconds flat. Dying to Sasuke doesn’t seem too bad._

_A streak of light, and then a hand through his chest, piercing a lung and skimming his heart. The twittering dies down and leaves them in an oddly companionable silence only disturbed by Sasuke’s laboured breathing and his own wet, choking gasps._

_He coughs and spits blood, drawing Sasuke’s eyes down to his mouth. The wound in his chest gushes over his arm, spattering on the ground when Sasuke changes the angle of his arm as he leans in and for a bizarre moment Naruto wonders if they’re about to kiss. The world narrows down to just the two of them._

_Behind them, a crunch of a footstep on the ground. Naruto’s eyes flicker up and meet Sakura’s as she runs up behind them. Sasuke tries to pull his arm out of the Chidori-made hole -_

He’s going to kill her.

_Naruto can’t let that happen. He can’t watch the girl he loves like a sister die. He grabs the arm in his chest with both hands tightly, using every last ounce of strength to keep him in place. Sasuke hesitates only a second too long, foot slipping in the blood and then it’s too late. Sakura comes up from behind and a hand connects with the side of his head, crumpling his skull and blowing through it in a shower of blood, hair, bone, and teeth._

_Sasuke’s limp body slumps and the arm pulls free from the hole in his chest with a sickening sound._

_“Oh my god,” Sakura says, looking sick. She clutches at her stomach where a deep sword wound is still bleeding. “I just killed him.”_

_Naruto stares at the body without comprehension. His blood is still gushing out from his chest, and he watches as it mixes with Sasuke’s. This wasn’t supposed to happen. His head spins from shock and blood loss and the world tilts sideways until he’s lying in the pool of blood seeping out from Sasuke’s nearly headless body._

_Sakura vomits until she dry-heaves. “Oh god...”_

_His vision darkens at the edges. He’s dying. He almost laughs but chokes up more blood instead. Well, he was the one who said he’d follow Sasuke anywhere. This time he’ll be following him to the Pure Land._

_A shadow looms over them._

_Sakura shouts in alarm and weakly tries to throw a punch at Kaguya floating just above the gore, but she’s easily rebuffed. In a mockery of when he was pinned to the ground by Pein, he watches Sakura get tossed into the air and land heavily far away from them. He can tell from her landing that she won’t be getting back up._

_Kaguya picks him up by his neck. He needs to hurry up and die before she sends him back to the dream!_

_“Uh oh, Sasuke really died…” the voice from her sleeve says. Naruto looks into it and sees glowing eyes and a toothy grimace. Black Zetsu. “Mom, what do we do now?”_

_Kaguya wordlessly points a delicate nail at the Chibaku Tensei holding Kurama and it splits in half. And then he feels burning pain in his stomach as she jabs her fingers into it; he realizes what she’s doing when Kurama’s chakra begins tearing away from the fox's body, leaving only bones as he howls._

_He becomes a jinchuuriki once again, and his chest wound slowly knits back together._

_“Indra… was a good child,” Kaguya murmurs. “However, you’re the one Hagoromo chose on the eve of his death, aren’t you? Is that how you defeated Indra? Hagoromo’s power?”_

_“I didn’t defeat him,” he hisses. “I didn’t want Sasuke to die. I didn’t fight back at all! And now it -” he shudders through a sob “- it’s like this! Damnit!”_

_“No, you didn’t fight back, did you? And yet you live while Indra grows cold at our feet. It feels as though fate itself has chosen you. You, who endured every trial. My son chose well with you, Asura.”_

_He dimly notes Sakura’s chakra signature disappearing._

_“I am not a fool. I now realize you will not be contained by this genjutsu. You’ve impressed me. With you and Indra, I did not want to make the same mistake as with Hamura and Hagoromo. I had intended to relentlessly crush your souls. However, the longer you both were inside my dream, the more I wanted dearly to become a family with you. I wanted you to understand me. But now I see that it was I who did not understand you. Perhaps… I will give you a chance to prove yourself to me.”_

_The eye on her forehead slowly opens and he squeezes his own tightly shut. Long, painted nails painfully pry his eye open, stabbing into him to keep it open. The tomoe in her eye swirl and he descends into darkness._

_He feels a sensation similar to when Itachi planted the crow inside of him, but instead of a crow it’s inky blackness, a shadowy thing crawling inside of his mind and slipping beneath the water like a shark waiting for the right moment to strike. He feels drawers and doors being torn open, again and again and again -_

_When he comes to, he’s standing in front of a wall of red._

_“Kakashi’s dead.”_

_… No, it’s a door, rather. The door she made. The door that will lead to a place where he can prove himself to her._

_Obito laughs madly behind him._

_..._

_He goes through the door with Obito and Kurama at his sides._

  


His hands unclench from the sides of his head and he uncurls from his fetal position in the bloody water.

“Naruto?”

The red moon. Kakashi’s death. Sasuke’s head and the shower of brains. The smell of Team 7’s blood mixing. The dark thing inside of his head. He looks down at the water and wonders where it’s hiding.

“Naruto?” Kurama anxiously asks again, shifting nervously behind his newly reinstated cell bars.

“I’m here,” he answers. “I remember. Hehe, sorry,” he smiles sheepishly and rubs a hand on the back of his neck. “I guess I got so used to repressing stuff… And it’s not like my memories are really sorted right now anyways, ya know? Geez, what a mess.”

Kurama huffs and tries not to look too pleased. “Thank the creator of all things. If I had been stuck in the _little_ you all over again -” He shivers dramatically, shaking the ground.

He responds maturely by sticking his tongue out.

Kurama grins widely at him, all teeth, and opens his mouth again to say something then stops and cocks his head to listen. “Someone’s coming, Naruto. You should leave this place. They’re not an enemy but they’re angry.”

“If I have to,” he grumbles and then sticks his fist out to meet Kurama’s just behind the bars. Kurama’s trust and support flows into him, and his flows back, perfectly even and balanced. It’s a relief to feel it. “Just… keep talking to me if you can through this thing. I can’t be alone right now.”

“Of course, partner.”

Someone’s shaking him awake. His fist flies out and connects with the unknown person’s throat. They gag and stumble back away from his bed, choking. Naruto wants to keep sleeping, but he supposes he should see who he just hit at the very least. Probably not Kakashi. He cracks an eye open and sees -

“Iruka-sensei?” Naruto asks, somewhat dazed. “What are you doing here?”

“ _Naruto,_ ” Iruka scolds with difficulty, still clutching his throat. “What do you mean, ‘what are you doing here?’ I could ask you the same thing! It’s team placement today! This isn’t the time to be sleeping in.”

He scratches his cheek and feels wet. Ah, he was crying. He rubs his face dry on his comforter.

“Naruto,” Iruka starts, sounding slightly uncomfortable, “are you… alright?”

“I had a nightmare,” he responds almost robotically. His whole life has been nothing but nightmare after nightmare recently so it’s not _exactly_ a lie, which is good because even after everything… he still sucks at lying. Half-truths are much easier to manage.

Iruka is quiet for a moment before perching himself on the edge of the bed. “About Mizuki, right? And about the… the fox?”

Naruto bites his tongue before he asks who Mizuki is and just nods. He vaguely remembers there was that idiot who tricked him into stealing the Forbidden Scroll. He can’t be mad about it now because he got his super cool Kage Bunshin jutsu from it - not _your_ jutsu, a voice that sounds suspiciously like Tobirama’s says - but he supposes that it would be pretty traumatizing for him to suddenly be almost killed and then be told about a giant demon in his stomach. It’s mundane news looking back, but you have to start the trend of life-changing revelations mid-battle somewhere.

“ _You’re calling me mundane?_ ” Kurama asks snippily.

Naruto almost laughs that _that’s_ the first thing he slips through the cage but catches himself and schools his expression to look appropriately depressed for Iruka’s benefit.

His teacher sighs and itches the scar across the bridge of his nose. “I understand that was a lot for you to take in. I’d thought you were okay yesterday, but... I’m sorry for not realizing just how much it affected you. You shouldn’t have had to be alone after something like that.” Iruka smiles crookedly and looks guiltily at him. “Please forgive me.”

Ahh… It was kind of hard to remember after so long in the dream, but _this_ is what he had fought so hard for. People who loved him and who he loved in return. His family, those bonds that had been forged through spilled blood and tears for one another. Protecting people like Iruka is worth any amount of pain and suffering.

“It’s okay, Iruka-sensei. I bet in a few years, I won’t even remember Mizuki-teme at all!” Naruto cracks a teasing grin at his inside joke. “And besides, I learned a super cool jutsu!”

He’ll go pay his respects at Tobirama’s grave later so that he feels less like the man’s spirit is hanging over him with an expression of doom.

Iruka looks relieved and his eyes soften into an emotion that makes Naruto’s heart hurt in a good way. “I’m glad…” He sighs and claps his hands on his knees. “Alright! Get ready to go and we’ll head off to the Academy for those team assignments! What do you say?”

Naruto responds by flinging the sheets onto Iruka’s head and running away to his closet before the man can retaliate.

“H-Hey!”

He hasn’t felt this free in a very long time. The darkness lurking in the waters of his mind frightens him, and the cage means he's back at step one, but at least for now he can relax a little and breathe. Just for a little while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll go more in depth into the dream and what it entailed for the characters in future chapters, but for right now all that needs to be said is that it messed our main two boys up pretty well.


	2. Halcyon days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naruto becomes a genin again, juggles his emotions, and decides on a course of action.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some minor warnings for self-harm at the end of the chapter!
> 
> Unfortunately Obito didn't make it into this chapter but he will be back for the next one.
> 
> On a side note, I'll be playing a little loose and fast with some canon material to try and make it a little more cohesive or just make more sense to me. Again I'm going to try and keep things from going to OOC/headcannonish but some things may change.

“Go on ahead,” Iruka motions, “I’m going to go grab the list of the teams.”

Naruto puts a hand on the sliding door and stops. He hadn’t really thought about it on the way over but now he’s here, standing quite literally on the threshold of seeing the faces of all of his friends, younger and less… less of friends. None of them really care about him. None of them would fight to the death beside him. None of them _know_ him.

He’s alone.

Kurama pulses his chakra just enough to warm his skin that suddenly feels so cold.

He takes a steadying breath and opens the door, quickly slipping in and heading to the back. Some of the civilian kids that failed their genin tests the first time around glare at him, some point at his hitai-ate and whisper.

Kiba’s the first one to confront him. “Oi Naruto, what the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

He looks at tiny Kiba and tinier Akamaru and finds his throat a little too tight to talk so he just points at the headband that he’d tied around his neck for something new to try.

“What the hell? That’s awesome man!” Kiba grins approvingly and Akamaru yips.

Naruto forces the corner of his mouth to quirk up briefly and deliberately keeps his eyes away from the other side of the room where _Sasuke..._ \--- his chest hurts. He can’t move - he feels paralyzed with pain. He sees Sasuke’s head turn into gore, crushed by Sakura’s unrelenting force.

He almost breaks someone’s hand when they touch his forearm and shock him out of his memory. Shikamaru hisses in pain as Naruto tightens his hold, shifting the bones under the skin, before remembering where he is and dropping it with a startle.

Naruto gasps and gently touches his once and future friend's hand, automatically tries to match their chakra signatures to soothe the injury. “I - I am so sorry, Shikamaru!”

Shikamaru blinks widely at their touching hands and stretches his out with a fascinated expression. Naruto tries not to sweat as Shikamaru’s dark eyes take on a calculating glint before dulling back into laziness. “Whatever, it’s fine. You were just spacing out...” Then he yawns and lays his head back down on his arms and begins to ignore Naruto’s existence.

Taking the opportunity, Naruto quickly retreats and takes a seat next to the quietest person he can think of - Shino. He’d have picked Hinata but he doesn’t really know how to approach her yet, the girl who had so boldly declared her love for him. It’ll really suck when it comes time to let her down. He is just _so_ not good with girls.

Shino takes a look at him from the corner of his shades and then looks back at the front. It’s nice. Quiet. Really relaxed. If only the buzzing kikaichuu would relax too.

Naruto turns to him with a fond smile. “Are you excited, Shino?”

The bug-nin nods and responds in his typical calm fashion, “I am looking forward to team placements. Why? My parents inform me the genin team becomes a second family.”

A second family, huh. That's right. Sakura as his sister that didn’t take any nonsense and always knew what was best, Kakashi as a big brother who was too cool to really deal with them when they were young and loud but still looking after them, and Sasuke… Sasuke as the black sheep of the family, following his own path stubbornly and proudly despite how twisted and dark it became.

But, when he doesn’t have a first family to compare it to, he wonders if the others felt the same way about it.

Iruka opens the door to the classroom and meets his eyes, nodding to him.

He smiles at Shino as the kikaichuu buzz louder at the teacher’s appearance. “Your bugs sound really excited too,” he observes happily.

Shino gives him a sharp look. “... They are. Why? Because we share our emotions.”

“I’m sure you’ll love your team!” he whispers as Iruka motions for quiet. Shino watches him for a moment and then nods his head in response. “I wish the same for you.”

“Alright kids, I will now announce your teams,” Iruka calls.

Team placement goes by quickly. “Team 7: Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura, and -”

_“... Sasuke, I can’t follow you there.”_

“- Uchiha Sasuke.”

_“Oh god. I just killed him.” Blood and teeth and bone and brains -_

He smells blood everywhere and his chest hurts so badly he might pass out from the pain. He looks at his trembling hands and sees crimson red soaking them. It’s so hard to breathe, Sasuke hit his lung, that’s right, that’s why he can’t get any air -

Something moves on his hand, breaking the illusion and snapping him back to the present, and he watches the small black dot trudge across his skin. He looks closer. It’s… a bug?

“Shino,” Naruto says quietly, holding the hand with the kikaichuu on it towards the other boy, “I owe you one. Thanks.”

Whether the boy knows for what or not, without a word the bug flits back over to Shino, dipping behind his high collar.

When team assignments are over, Iruka calls a break for lunch and for the new teammates to get to know one another before they would reconvene for their sensei to come get them.

Naruto isn’t very hungry at all. He keeps his eyes down as he leaves, determined to avoid yet another painful flashback to something that - to him - only happened an hour or two ago. His Sasuke, the boy - the man - who had become closer to him than any other, closer than a brother and closer than a friend, and yet so far away all at once, dead. He can’t do this. He’ll fail the test Kakashi gives and float away from the system. Maybe he’ll run away from Konoha altogether. It’d be easier that way.

Turning the corner he bumps into someone’s back.

“Eek! Hey, you -!” Ino growls, hair whipping as she spins around to face him, clearly in a bad mood that she’s stuck on a team with Chouji and Shikamaru. “Oh, Naruto! What the heck is wrong with you?!” Ino’s face morphs from angry to confused in a blink, eyes curiously flickering over his expression. “Er… Are you okay?”

Chouji munches on chips next to her and Shikamaru looks torn between laziness and slight interest, as though he can’t quite decide if it’s worth the trouble of paying attention or not.

They look like his friends used to. They sound like they used to. Maybe they’d become those people again someday... or maybe they wouldn’t.

He bursts into tears.

The team is supposed to be like a family, but they had all died bloody deaths and now he’s here again, a faker and a liar and a cheater. Someone who should have died. He _should be dead,_ with Sasuke in the Pure Land. With his mom, and dad too when the Edo Tensei finally faded. With Jiraiya. Kakashi. Sakura. Neji. Nagato and Konan. Haku. So many dead, and yet the universe had been broken in half before he could die.

It's not fair.

He’s alone. He’s alone, _alone alone alone --_

Someone guides him to a quiet place as he bawls his eyes out until they ache and he feels like the sadness inside him won’t rip him in half anymore.

Coming back to himself, he blinks the remaining tears out of his eyes. They’re in the bathroom and Ino pops out of a stall with some toilet paper that she pats his face with. Shikamaru and Chouji are guarding the door, both looking somewhat embarrassed.

“Okay, fess up. What happened?” Ino demands, folding the toilet paper over in her hand and patting his face gently some more.

“Nothing,” he lies quickly.

Ino and Shikamaru make nearly identical sounds of disbelief.

“Sorry, it’s just… private.”

“I’d almost think this was your time of the month or something,” Ino comments flippantly then pauses, a little hesitant. “It’s not... Is it?”

“No.”

“Phew, ‘cause I don’t have any of my stuff with me so it would’ve been a real rush to get some before you bled everywhere,” Ino sighs in relief.

Shikamaru and Chouji both shuffle uncomfortably in the background and Ino wags her fist at them. “You two oafs better not say anything stupid! God, you two. It’s almost like you never got given the Talk.”

Shikamaru gags audibly.

Naruto digs his knuckles into his eyes to rub away the last bit of tears and laughs a bit at their antics, somewhat distracting him from his worries.

“You girls are totally disgusting,” Shikamaru says vehemently. “All your gross… liquids. Eugh.”

“Come over here and say that! Girls are totally awesome!”

“They are,” Naruto agrees full heartedly. All the women he’d ever had in his life had been amazing. Tsunade-baa-chan and Shizune as the mother and sister he’d never had, Ayame in the Ichiraku wonder duo who had never made him feel unwanted, Hinata who had quietly watched and supported him since they were young, Sakura who had -

_“Oh my god. I just killed -”_

“Naruto!”

He startles at Ino’s shout for him, pulse pounding and skin feeling cold and clammy. What the hell is happening to him?

Ino stares at him with a mixture of worry and curiosity. He supposes this is the first time she’s ever really seen someone messed up in the head right in front of her rather than in theory during her family training.

“Tell me what’s wrong, please?”

He can feel the weight of the other two’s stares. How humiliating. There’s got to be something he can say to get her off his back, but he can’t tell the truth and he can’t _lie_ and make something up; Ino would never fall for his bad acting.

An insane idea crosses his mind. He knows something they don’t, something big, and something scary.

“ _I’m flattered,_ ” Kurama nearly purrs.

… and something a little stuck-up. A secret only _he_ can tell people.

“Well,” he says, fiddling with his jacket and peering up at Ino. He knows they’re good people, that their hearts are good. No one told him he couldn’t be a little more open this time around. There’s no rules to this. “You know how Mizuki-teme isn’t here today?”

“Yeah?”

“The truth is… I failed the exam. I couldn't perform a bunshin, and so Mizuki tricked me into stealing something really important from Hokage-jiji and promised that if I did it I would pass…"

Ino gasps. "My dad was up in the middle of the night two nights ago thanks to some kind of alarm going out! It was because you stole something?" Her eyes glint at the juicy potential gossip.

"Che, how the hell did _you_ steal something from the _Hokage?_ " Shikamaru asks disbelievingly, ever the pragmatic.

"First off, no one really expects someone to be so stupid to sneak into the Hokage tower so no one even paid attention me… and honestly, the Hokage is a giant perv. All you need to do is Henge into a sexy girl and he passes out with a nosebleed."

Team 10 gape at him. After a moment they recover. Shikamaru nods consideringly while looking the tiniest bit uncomfortable. "Well, I suppose your, er… 'unique' Henge was useful there."

Ino scowls at that even though she's a kunoichi. Don't kunoichi train in using their looks against their enemies? There's a lot of powerful, perverted men out there that girls can turn into brainless, useless idiots just by flashing some skin. And then of course they could kill them or whatever. And really! The Oiroke technique was always intended to be an _anti-pervert_ move! Not his fault everyone assumes the worst.

"What happened next, Naruto?" Chouji asks, excitedly munching on his chips with the air of watching a dramatic movie.

"Well, I took the scroll he asked me steal to this meeting place in the woods… But Iruka-sensei showed up first and told me the truth, that he was tricking me. And then, Mizuki attacked both of us. You saw the bandages Iruka-sensei was wearing didn't you?"

They share glances and nod. Iruka had done a good job at looking like he wasn’t in pain, but medics could only do so much - unless that medic happened to be Senju Tsunade, of course. They had sealed up the cuts until at least they weren’t bleeding everywhere, had slathered numbing paste everywhere, sewn up what couldn’t be closed with jutsu, and then wrapped the man up until he was nearly a mummy.

"Mizuki… He told me why everyone hates me, before he tried to kill me."

"Hate you? I'm sure _everyone_ doesn't _hate_ you," Ino says, tilting her head.

Shikamaru doesn’t comment but his eyes turn sharp and Naruto can tell he’s thinking a thousand miles a minute, probably compiling all of his interactions with and knowledge of Naruto. They hadn’t exactly been close friends when they were kids, but they’d hung out enough for Shikamaru to get an idea of the life he’d lived.

"It's true, Ino. The reason is…" His stomach turns over as he prepares himself to rip off the bandaid all over again. It had never been easy for him to address Kurama until they had been partners fighting side-by-side with all of their allies in the war. It had always felt like taboo.

He steels himself. Kurama and he shouldn't have to hide in the shadows. Shikamaru is smart, Ino is clever, Chouji is kind, and all three of them are intensely loyal. They're among the safest ones to approach this topic with first. "The reason is, the night of the Kyuubi attack, the demon _wasn't_ killed. He was sealed inside of a newborn baby."

Ino takes a step back before catching herself, eyes wide.

Shikamaru nods with a calculating look, digesting the information easily. "And that baby was you. So, everyone treats you like shit because… What? They think you're the Kyuubi? Wasn't it the Yondaime who sealed it, then?"

"Yeah."

He scoffs. "Idiots. He was one of the best sealers of all time. As if he'd make a mistake like that. Not to mention,” he adds, smirking at Naruto, “I get the feeling the Kyuubi wouldn’t be wasting its time in school doing stupid pranks."

Chouji seems to think for a second and then decisively holds out his neverending chip bag to Naruto. That simple action is the loudest and clearest declaration of friendship Chouji could ever show, and he gratefully takes a chip.

Ino toys with the hem of her skirt, then adjusts her hitai-ate, then straightens her hair as Shikamaru and Chouji watch with exasperation that can only come from being childhood friends. Finally she stomps her foot. "Alright! I've decided! I don't care! You're still just weird, silly Naruto. So that's that. But!" She points at finger at him drastically. "You definitely need to talk to someone, like my dad maybe, if getting attacked and being told something like that is affecting you this much. It's not healthy. My daddy says the most deadly thing for a shinobi is poor mental health."

The weight of the world lifts slightly off his shoulders.

"Actually, I think I feel better just having told you guys. I just… kept doubting myself. Sandaime-jiji said that he banned anyone from telling people about it so that maybe I could have friends and live a normal life but… everyone still hates me. I thought if you guys knew, you'd want me to die too. So, _thank you._ " He bows deeply to them. He truly is grateful. The people he had loved and fought for are alive inside of these children, and with that reaffirmed it's time for him to begin the fight to protect them all over again.

It's worth it, he decides. It will all be worth it.

Ino grabs his shoulders and straightens him up before hugging him tightly. "Shut up, idiot, and just promise me if it's still bad for you that you'll tell me so I can help you. We’re all shinobi of Konoha now which means we have to help each other out."

"Me too," Chouji volunteers. "I'll bring you some food. My mom makes a really good soup that always makes me feel better after I cry."

Shikamaru groans, rubbing the back of his neck and glaring at the ceiling. "Troublesome… These two will totally be on my case if I don’t throw something in. I guess I wouldn't care if you cloudwatch with me once in awhile, if you're quiet. It's relaxing. Could help with panic attacks, or whatever." Ino shoves him lightly at his dismissive demeanor and Chouji snickers at Shikamaru’s grumbling.

He grins so wide it hurts.

"Anyways, it's time to go back now," Shikamaru says tiredly, yawning from the exhausting interaction.

"Let's head back then," he says still smiling like a lunatic. "But, can you guys promise me you won't tell anyone you know? It’s an S-rank secret… If you tell someone you might get into huge trouble.” Like execution levels of trouble, he doesn’t say.

Ino rolls her eyes. "Of course! Duh! We’re ninja now, not blabbermouth kids. Right, you two?!"

They nod their heads sharply at the threatening tone. Naruto laughs and feels hope spark inside of him. When they all take their places in the classroom, he doesn’t feel the crushing weight of the war quite so much. When he hears Sakura call Sasuke’s name in a joyful squeal he doesn’t hurt inside quite so badly.

He can do this.

* * *

Like the first time around they waited for Kakashi, it takes hours. Everyone eventually leaves with their own team leaders, Team 10 looking back at him as they go. Ino gives him a secretive thumbs up and Chouji waves goodbye.

He sits in the back to avoid his team and starts hovering a pencil above his hand, noting with relief that his control doesn’t seem quite as poor as it did when he was actually 12. It’s not as good as it had been, probably unbalanced thanks to the change in his chakra levels and the fact that the Four Symbols Seal is back, but it’s passable.

Chakra control mostly stems from keeping his yin and yang chakra in balance - in his youth, his yang chakra, the physical chakra, had grown vastly while his yin chakra, the spiritual side, had been lacking. Now he has an influx of yin chakra, fostered from his large mental and spiritual growth during the war, meeting with his younger body that has a decent pool of raw yang chakra ready to meet him. It’ll also make handling Kurama’s pure chakra easier with his own being more evenly balanced.

Briefly he wonders what will happen to Kurama - the Kurama that had come back with him was all of his yin half, whereas the Kurama in his seal should be the yang half.

“... _That’s a good question,_ ” Kurama admits. “ _As a being of pure chakra, it may be that the yin side that traveled through the door with you will somehow combine with me while I am still in your seal._ ”

_You’ll be whole again?_

“ _Perhaps, but your seal was designed only to keep one half inside. I cannot say what will happen if both halves combine. Your seal may break._ ”

That… would suck. He’ll have to get his hands on the seal’s key before that happens. If he can put the Torii seal on instead, then having both halves shouldn’t be an issue.

He refocuses on his minor chakra control test and tunes out Sakura’s mild chatter from the front. Once Sakura gets awkward about being the only one talking, she too quiets down in her seat next to Sasuke towards the front of the class, only occasionally looking back at him as though checking to make sure he’s still there and not getting up to any trouble.

The clock hits the next hour and Kakashi pokes his head through the door - an eraser doesn’t fall on him, he doesn’t tell them he hates them, and as a group they head to the roof.

When they’re settled, Kakashi looks them over. “Let’s begin by introducing yourselves.”

“What do you want to know?” Sakura asks.

“Oh, you know, your likes, dislikes, dreams for the future… Things like that.”

Sakura frowns and shifts uneasily. “I don’t know… You look kinda suspicious.”

Kakashi looks utterly bored. “Alright, well why don’t I go first then? My name is Hatake Kakashi. I don’t really feel like telling you my likes or dislikes. My dreams…? Hm. I have lots of hobbies.”

“So... all he told us is his name?”

“You, on the right, you go first.”

Naruto curls inwards a bit before forcing his heartbeat to slow down, and rubs his nose to get the phantom smell of Kakashi’s blood out of it. Kurama pulses his chakra soothingly again and he sees Kakashi tense ever so slightly in response. “My name is Uzumaki Naruto, nice to meet you. I like a lot of things, and don’t dislike very many others. I have a dream that is very important to me. As for hobbies… Well, I have some. Please take care of me.”

“Stop trying to act so cool!” Sakura scowls. He shrugs unrepentantly. If Kakashi wants to be vague and unhelpful, so will he. When Kakashi starts playing ball, then and only then will Naruto give him anything back. Push and pull. He and Kurama are in harmony because they work together and trust one another with everything. If Kakashi wants to wait three years to start respecting him again, so be it.

The other two give their introductions and it’s the same as before: Sakura’s fawning over Sasuke and Sasuke’s dark determination to kill ‘a certain man’.

_Your brother is a good man who loves you,_ he thinks. _One day, if you kill him, you’ll be heartbroken._

But that won’t happen. Naruto will find a way to save Sasuke, and Itachi too. He won’t let the darkness claim them this time.

Kakashi delightfully explains to them how hopeless their situation is to actually pass the survival test and become genin, emphasizing their chances of failure and how they’ll puke if they eat any breakfast beforehand. Sakura looks worried as he dismisses them, Sasuke looks mulishly determined -- and he excuses himself, and finds a quiet corner in the now empty Academy to cry in.

It’s hard. It’s _so_ hard.

His brother, his sister, the man he loved - his family. All three of them don’t _see_ him anymore. Sakura looks at him with disdain and Sasuke ignores his existence, and even Kakashi’s eye had skimmed over him uncaringly. He’s become nothing all over again.

He wishes again with all of his heart that he had died with his team there under the red moon and the boughs of the god tree.

After a brief pitstop in the bathroom to wash his face and tears off, he makes his way out of the Academy and stops at the sound of his name. Iruka waves him over with a beaming face that dims slightly when he notices the redness around his eyes, but he keeps grinning and motions for Naruto to walk with him.

“I was waiting for you. Man, the rumours about Kakashi-san are true, huh? I’d heard he’s always late, but I never thought it would be this bad.”

It’s obvious he’s trying to distract him from the dark clouds hanging over his head. Naruto stops and hugs him, squeezes him as tight as he can, and the chuunin returns it just as tightly.

Iruka didn’t change. He still sees him. He still cares about him.

“Iruka-sensei,” he says with a choked voice. “Thank you.”

“It’s okay. You’re okay,” Iruka promises him. “Let’s go get some ramen, huh?”

He pulls away and scrubs at his eyes. “Yeah.”

* * *

Maybe he really should just fail. He henges into a boy with red hair and a pale face that reminds him of Nagato and runs off to get breakfast. Like hell he’ll show up starving again for Kakashi’s sick amusement. Seriously, the guy should’ve gone into T&I. He’d annoy the prisoners into spilling their guts just so he’d go away.

He chews on the sandwich he’d bought thoughtfully. Fail? Or pass?

The trick to passing is simple. Just work together. But can he look at Sasuke without seeing _that_? Can he listen to Sakura without hearing _that_? Her final words. His final moment.

What is he to do?

“ _Just fail so we can leave this damned village,_ ” Kurama grumbles, annoyed at his host’s worrying and back-and-forth thoughts.

Maybe it’s for the best. If Sasuke fails, then he’d be sent back to the Academy right? If he won’t be there for the Chuunin Exams, then maybe Orochimaru wouldn’t -- Yeah right. If Orochimaru wants him so badly, he’d find a way to get him no matter where he is in the village. And that’s assuming Kakashi doesn’t have actual orders from above his head to pass them no matter what, just on the basis of the Uchiha heir.

Well, he and Sakura could fail and Kakashi could take Sasuke on as an apprentice. But is that fair to Sakura? She had been so fragile at the beginning, insecure in herself despite her strong inner will. Without passing and becoming a genin, what will become of her? Will she ever meet Tsunade? Will she ever bloom into the powerful kunoichi she had become in the war?

Is it _better_ for her if she remains a civilian? Is it better to keep her away from the death and blood and fear of the life she isn’t ready for just yet? Is it even right for him to be making decisions for her life?

He finishes his breakfast and heads to the meeting point Kakashi had specified about an hour late. The decision isn’t easy. He wants to see _his_ Sakura again. He wants, selfishly, to try and be near Sasuke again. The Sasuke he had loved more dearly than he had loved himself is gone, but he has another chance.

Kurama sighs loudly. “ _You’re not going to fail, are you?_ ”

He shrugs guiltily.

“ _You’ll be under heavy surveillance if you truly become a ninja of this village. Naruto, you know that we must focus on more important things. My siblings, your siblings by circumstance… They need us._ ”

The thought sobers him. Can he be so selfish when so much is at stake? He doesn’t know what happened to Obito when the door opened, so for now he must operate on the belief that he’s the only one who can stop the war from happening. He’ll kill his heart and fail the test for the sake of the world...!

“ _Oh, stop being so dramatic. Do what you want already. Just don’t blame me when you have to go missing-nin._ ”

He grins. _Thanks for your blessing._

Sakura shouts at him for being late when he arrives, but he just smiles and avoids looking at their third member. He can’t keep up the game of avoidance forever, not if they’ll be a team, not when he wants to see the boy so badly… But for now, until at least the test has passed, he needs to keep himself together.

They fall into silence and wait another few hours until Kakashi deigns to show up. Sakura screams at him and Naruto feels his lips turn up at the nostalgia.

Kakashi explains the mission statement to them and primes the clock.

“Ready? … Begin.”

What to do, what to do? Go after Sakura? Charge head-on at Kakashi? Two things are for sure: he won’t be the one tied up on that stupid log this time around, and he _absolutely_ won’t be getting Kakashi’s fingers jammed up his ass. Kurama barks out a laugh at the memory and keeps guffawing even as his face goes red.

_Shut the hell up you fleabag!_

His idiot of a partner slowly quiets down, sniggering now and then.

He catches sight of some pink hair as he jumps into the treeline to get _very_ far away from Kakashi. Sakura it is.

It takes him clamping a hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming as he lands next to her without a sound. When he’s sure she’s calm, or at least won’t start yelling bloody murder, he lets her go and puts a finger over his lips.

“Be quiet,” he whispers.

“Naruto!” she hisses loudly back. Ah well. She’s not exactly the epitome of stealth, but Naruto won’t try to kid himself - if Kakashi wants to hear them then he would, whispering or not. “What do you want?!”

Time to cut to the chase. “Let’s team up.”

Her jaw drops open with an expression of shock and then disgust. “As if! I’m not going to help _you_ get a bell, because that means Sasuke-kun will fail!”

Aw, she’s so cute when she’s angry. Her eyes always glint a sharper green. It’s actually part of why he’d been so drawn to her when they were younger, even with her more violent tendencies. The determination on her face only makes him feel sick just a bit, compared to the desperation she’d worn just before she -

Kurama stops him. “ _Don’t think about that._ ”

He swallows back the bitter memory.

“I-I’ve already thought of that. Check this out.” He snatches a leaf off the bush they’re hiding behind and in a tiny poof of smoke it transforms into a bell, identical to the ones hanging from Kakashi’s side. “We’ll get the other two from him, and then since he can’t tell the difference, he’ll _have_ to pass all of us!”

“As _if_ a jounin wouldn’t be able to tell!”

“Can you?” he challenges.

She grabs at the bell in his hand. “Henge is a _genjutsu_ , Naruto, even you should know -” her hand closes around it “- that it… isn’t… real…” She shakes the bell in her hands and it jingles. Putting her hands in the ram position, she builds and disrupts her chakra flawlessly. “Kai!” The bell is still there when she’s done. She stares at it and then at him. “Okay, how do you plan on getting the other two bells?”

He grins and points. Kakashi is still in the centre of the clearing, seemingly content for now to just let them group up and plan, but one thing has changed. In his hands is a bright orange book.

Sakura squints at it and then flails her arms as she falls backwards. “P-PERVERT!” she screams, and then yelps as Naruto bodily drags her off into a different direction to at least _pretend_ to hide somewhere Kakashi can’t see them.

“Sakura, you remember the henge I used in class?”

The fist bouncing off his skull is answer enough as she huffs and puffs with a red face. A tremor of fear glances through him as he imagines his skull being crushed too, but Kurama bites down on that thought and he refocuses.

“Great. It’s _super_ effective on perverted guys, just like…” he jabs a thumb towards the clearing. “It’ll probably knock him out flat. I’ve used it on tough guys before and they always pass out. One of us just has to run in and grab the bells while he’s unconscious, then we mix them up with my fake bell, and then we all pass!”

The girl bites at her bottom lip, looking back and forth between him and the bell, clearly struggling with her desire to pass and her hatred of the perversion inherent to Naruto’s plan.

“Sakura, why did you become a ninja?”

She blinks at the sudden question. “Um, both of my parents were… And… I guess I just thought they were so cool and brave when I was a kid, I wanted to be like them. I want them to be proud of me.”

“That’s a nice reason. But, ya know… being a ninja isn’t always glamorous,” Naruto scolds. The gravity in his voice must be compelling enough that she doesn’t seem put-out at him lecturing her. “If you have a tool in your arsenal, use it, even if it seems underhanded. This is the best plan I have to get all three of us a bell, unless you can think of something better.”

She grimaces and then closes her fist around the bell. “Alright.” When she looks back up her eyes are blazing with determination. “Go knock that pervert sensei out!”

He jumps out of the treeline, already forming the seal for Kage Bunshin. He’s not going to give Kakashi even a _chance_ to resist his womanly charms! It’s time for his Harem jutsu!

… Really, he’s an anti-pervert, he swears.

“So, you’re the first one out, eh?” Kakashi drawls lazily, flipping a page in his book and looking as though he doesn’t have a care in the world. “Well, let’s see what you’ve got.”

Naruto smiles. He and his clones all leap at the man together, puffs of smoke appearing around them in midair as they all transform into varied buxom women. Kakashi’s eye goes as round as a coin as they all undulate against him and moan his name. After three years with Jiraiya, this technique had been polished to absolute perfection - the proportions are exact, the women he can flawlessly transform into has increased to a wide variety, and the authenticity he can provide the motions and the moans is even better. Sitting around in brothels bored out of his mind and waiting for his master, not such a waste of time looking back! What may not have worked against Kakashi back then is something damn near lethal now.

Pride fills him as he hears spluttering coming from the edge of the clearing and the _definite_ sound of someone falling out of a tree.

With an odd squeak, the famous Copycat Kakashi faints, the sole patch of skin showing on his face a bright red and the faintest trace of blood staining his mask darker around his nose. The naked women turn to the fuming Sakura and give her cheery thumbs ups, the real twin bells dangling from Naruto’s hand as he poofs back to normal, dispelling the clones as he does.

“All done, Sakura!” He jogs over and motions for the fake bell. Looking over all three of them together with a critical eye, he nods. “Yup, looks good.”

She grinds her teeth with a barely repressed seething anger, glittering eyes looking between Naruto and Kakashi with equal measure. Naruto gets the unique feeling that she’s sizing them up, deciding which one will be castrated first. Woodenly, she takes one of Kakashi’s bells.

“Here, take the other real one and give it to S-Sasuke. He’d probably kill -- kick my ass if I tried to offer it to him.”

She does, and runs off into the forest to find him.

Nothing else to do but wait until Kakashi wakes up.

* * *

_What an odd dream._ He could’ve sworn he’d woken up, done his due diligence around town helping little old ladies and little scared cats, gone to do the bell test and then... Sensei’s son had turned into a moaning woman - or to be more precise, multiple moaning women. But _surely_ not.

He cracks his eye open and sees the blue sky. He touches his mask and feels the drying blood.

Not a dream.

He shoots up and touches his side - the bells are gone. Behind him, Naruto is standing at the stone with a pensive look on his face, his hand tracing the names engraved into it. The other two aren’t present. Another look at the sky tells him he hasn’t been out long, and the alarm clock he had set confirms it. Only a few minutes has passed since that rather _interesting_ combat technique. He supposes that’s on him for not expecting something like that.

Picking himself up he dusts off and then quickly and subtly changes his mask. He makes sure his book is securely in his pouch again before approaching the boy quite a bit more cautiously now that he knows the kinds of tricks he apparently has up his sleeve. That technique won’t work on him again, but… Well, it’s best to be careful.

“So,” Kakashi starts cheerfully. “You got yourself a bell. Are the other two off fighting over which one gets the other?”

Naruto looks at him then dismisses him, turning back to the stone, finger lingering over _Namikaze Minato_ . Kakashi’s stomach turns ever so slightly. _“That’s your father,”_ he wants to say. Instead he says, “Not so smart looking away from your enemy. I could just take the bells back now…”

He’s about to give Sensei’s son a lesson in taijutsu when the other two children stumble clumsily out of the woods just then, sounding about as subtle as a herd of elephants stampeding around.

“Oh, hey Sakura,” Naruto greets, looking up from the stone. “So you gave it to him?”

The girl nods breathlessly, holding out her hand and showing a bell. The Uchiha scowls darkly but he too holds out a hand and shows a bell glinting in the sun. Naruto also turns and shows a bell in _his_ hand. So that’s their play, huh… He’d noticed Sensei’s son talking to the girl but he hadn’t paid very close attention.

“So one of you has a fake bell, is that it?” he comments in a bored voice. Inwardly, he feels a glimmer of pride at the quickly made plan - the boy had taken the rules of the situation and immediately twisted them to his preference. After all, if they _all_ had bells, then how could he fail any of them?

However.

“Only two of you have _real_ bells, which means only two of you deserve to pass.”

The girl shoots Naruto a worried look. So he’s the one with the fake… That’s the honourable thing to do. It’s his plan; he should take the blowback if it fails. Time to put the pressure on.

“In fact, if you three don’t tell me right now which one of you has the fake, I’ll fail all of you right now. If you confess, I’ll pass the two with real bells like I promised.” He inserts just the tiniest amount of pressure behind his words, enough to make green genin sweat and squirm.

Haruno starts sweating under his gaze, her lip bitten raw and her eyes flickering between the boy at his side and the Uchiha who just glares at his teammates, undoubtedly cursing himself for going along with the plan. Naruto simply shrugs off his words.

The Uchiha and Haruno open their mouths at the same time -

“The truth is sensei,” Naruto interrupts before they can speak, still looking unbothered, “mine’s the fake. Let Sasuke and Sakura pass. I’ll go back to the Academy.”

Well, he certainly can’t fail the boy now, can he? But a team is a team. The other two haven’t proven anything except that they can follow Naruto’s plan. What did Sakura do to prove she can function in a team? What did Sasuke do?

“Er, bye then guys!” Naruto waves, turning to leave the training ground.

“Not so fast.” Kakashi grabs him by the shoulder and then releases immediately once the boy stops, feeling somehow like he’d burned himself. “I’ve changed my mind. Naruto is the only one who passes. You two failures can leave.”

“ _What?_ ” the Uchiha shouts, clenching his fist so tightly that he’s sure the bell has been crushed. “The idiot passes? For _what_?”

Kakashi’s lip curls. “Do either of you understand the real reason behind this test? I think Naruto is the _only one of you_ who saw underneath the underneath and perceived the true purpose. If ‘that idiot’ can do that, I wonder what that makes you?”

In a flash the Uchiha boy hurls a handful of shuriken at him, leaping immediately after and engaging him in a taijutsu bout, the girl calling after him in shock. He’s not bad. Some of his combinations are inspired, and he can see some of the Uchiha style mixed with the Academy forms. It’s a shame for him that the Uchiha style is designed purposefully to be used in conjunction with the Sharingan; without it, the style is blatantly open for counter attack which he takes advantage of judiciously.

After a swing leaves his side ever so slightly open, Kakashi jabs into it and feels the ribs bend under his attack, then grabs the arm and slams him face first into the ground, twisting the arm back and stepping firmly on his head to keep him there. To the boy’s credit, he doesn’t scream in pain.

“Don’t step on Sasuke-kun!”

He ignores her screech. “Let me make this clear for you: the purpose of this exercise was to see if you could operate as a team. Remind me again who it was that created a plan to help all of you pass?”

The Uchiha snarls wordlessly.

“B-but you said only two of us could pass!” Haruno complains. “You _wanted_ us to not work together!”

Sensei’s son interrupts. “That thing he said before, ‘underneath the underneath’... I think he’s trying to say that we were supposed to see through his words and understand the truth behind his actions.”

Those eyes are shaped like Kushina-san’s, but right now the look of them is all Minato-sensei. How did a kid like this get last place in his class?

“That…” The girls shakes her head and glares at him. “That’s not fair!”

“In the world of shinobi, there _is_ no ‘fair’. Let me tell you this, those who break the rules are trash… but those who abandon their teammates are even worse than trash! When I said that only those with the real bells would pass, you would have thrown Naruto away like garbage just to save your own skins!”

“That’s not true,” she lies, looking away guiltily. “And anyways, he’s the one who confessed! I didn’t say anything!”

“That’s right. That’s what convinced me he’s the only one who understands the true purpose of this exam. He made a replica of the bell and provided you two with the real ones even though you had done nothing to deserve them. And when his plan fell through, he surrendered himself so that you two, his teammates, would be able to pass this test and survive.”

The girl’s brow furrows in confusion at the word ‘survive’. Was he ever so young? That he didn't understand that a failed mission, even the slightest of errors, could mean the death of an entire team?

He pulls out two kunai, tossing one to Haruno and holding the other to the Uchiha’s neck. “Sakura, kill Naruto right now or else Sasuke dies.”

The girl picks up the kunai with an expression of terror and the boy beneath him goes extremely still. When he catches the look on Naruto’s face he almost drops the act to check if he’s alright. His Sensei’s son looks _crushed_. The pure despair on his face is so real it takes his breath away. It's the look of a soldier who has seen death and loss, who has had teammates die at their feet, _not_ the look that a newly minted genin should have. But when he and the girl look at one another, the sadness is washed away - or masked - by a peaceful smile.

“It’s okay, Sakura-chan.” Then he walks calmly over to the girl holding the kunai in a shaking grip with both hands and makes a sharp motion to step into it, to gut himself.

“ _Stop_!” he barks out, shoving himself off of the Uchiha and reaching for Naruto. Haruno is crying silently now, staring wide eyed and open mouthed at the boy who just turns that same smile onto him, stomach only a scant thread away from the blade.

For a second, he sees Obito’s smile as he’s crushed beneath a thousand pounds of rock, all thanks to _Kakashi_ , giving his life for his teammate, accepting that fate with nothing but utter grace. Obito, who had died alone and in the dark, unable to see or move. The smile that haunts his nightmares.

“Change your mind again, sensei?” Naruto asks him lightly, and he hears Obito’s voice.

Kakashi notices the flutter in his pulse and regulates his breathing. What the hell was this kid _thinking?_ The girl throws the kunai down and away from them, still crying and he distantly notes the Uchiha get up and limp away from him, taking out his own kunai and settling into a defensive stance.

“... That was an example of something you can experience in the field,” Kakashi says finally. “Don’t expect the enemy to change his mind, either.”

“Don’t worry Sakura,” Naruto says again quietly to the girl. “If it ever comes down to it, I’ll definitely die to save you and S-Sasuke. No matter what.”

And with the stern conviction in his voice, Kakashi doesn’t doubt it at all. With all of his heart, he prays that he will never have to come to this stone and read the name _Uzumaki Naruto_. That would simply be too cruel of a fate. He’s not sure if it would be more cruel to Naruto, or to himself.

He’s not sure he could take losing another one.

She sobs and punches him across the face. “Shut up, idiot! You scared me!”

Then, the Uchiha pounces again. Kakashi isn’t in the mood to play games anymore. He thrashes the boy and ties him maybe a bit too tightly against one of the three poles at the centre of the training area.

“Alright. I suppose I’ll give the three of you another shot after lunch - here, you two. Whatever you do, don’t give Sasuke _any_ to eat. I’ll be back.” And with that, he shunshins away, just far enough that he can still hear and see them.

It takes under five minutes for Naruto and Haruno to eat small portions of the bento he’d bought before taking turns quietly feeding the Uchiha. He’s mildly impressed. They hadn’t spoken a word to one another, instead choosing simply to communicate through simple gestures, glancing around suspiciously. They all had assumed, correctly as it were, that he hadn’t gone far. Perhaps they can become a team worth something after all.

“You… pass!”

He tells them about the stone at his back before he dismisses them. "Every person who's name is on this stone is a hero."

He doesn’t mention how he must have worn the stone smooth from all the times he’s visited here, all the names he’s read a thousand times. “These people died to protect their teammates, and Konoha. My best friend’s name is on this stone.”

Haruno unties the Uchiha boy as he speaks, and Kakashi hopes he can manage to get the message of teamwork through the dark-haired boy’s head before it’s too late. It’s almost unnatural how similar the three are to his genin team - the frigid genius, the lovesick girl, the unpredictable boy who’d die for a teammate.

He won’t let Naruto die to show the Uchiha what teamwork means.

“Tomorrow, we’ll meet here again.”

Then, he allows the three of them to go home, and doubles back after they’ve gone, unable to wait to tell Sensei, Kushina-san, Obito and Rin about his new team. He pushes the odd emotions and maturity Naruto had shown firmly out of his mind.

* * *

Naruto closes the door to his apartment behind him and his body starts to tremble. There’s a tight knot stuck at the base of his throat. He picks out a rough, somewhat dull-edged kunai from his pack. He’d never been able to get his hands on any good stuff, scavenging a few here and there but otherwise being outpriced or simply kicked out by every decent shinobi business.

It’s sides are dull with the beginnings of rust, the handle’s wrapping torn and with a stain or two that look like blood. It had been well worn by its owner and then left to rot in some field somewhere until Naruto had found it and taken it in, flaws and all. It had been used and abused and then thrown away without a care in the world, like the owner had never had to struggle or fight to own something as good as it.

He hikes his shirt and jacket up, then holds the tip of it against his stomach, pressing until he feels the tender bite and feels a prick of blood dripping down his skin.

“ _Naruto?_ ”

It must have been so awful. He thinks about the man who told him a dismal, heart crushing story about his friend who had gutted himself to save someone he loved. How terrible… What a terrible world they live in.

“ _Naruto, put that away_.”

Nagato and Yahiko… They must have been so scared. What did Konan think, watching it? He had barely spoken to her after Nagato had died, and then she was gone too before they could truly get to know one another. All three of them had died sad, sad deaths.

His sibling students, his brothers and sister. The pain they must have endured that day - he couldn’t understand it very well when he first spoke with Nagato, but now, after the war and the dream, he feels as though he can truly understand them. This knife in his stomach is the pain Yahiko felt. The terror in Sakura's eyes must be what Nagato had felt. He wonders if Sasuke could feel the same pain Konan had endured while watching her best friend kill himself for her. He wonders if Sasuke will ever understand that he would die for him.

“ _Naruto! Stop!_ ”

Pulling back into reality, he yanks the blade out of his stomach and blood spits across the floor in thick spurts. He’d managed to dig the kunai halfway in without realizing, cutting right down to his twisting innards, and the pain of it rushes into him, clearing his mind.

He’d almost forgotten.

There’s a tool in Konoha, sharp and bitter, a tool that doesn't know its own face. One that has been abused by its masters and treated like trash.

He has to find Kabuto.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so the chakra matching thing... Naruto can still match chakra signatures and flow chakra into another person but it doesn't have the same abilities as he had at the end of the war arc. It's just his own chakra - no Kurama or Hagoromo.
> 
> Naruto is dealing with a lot of stuff! Him suddenly being reminded of the Ame trio while he's emotionally vulnerable is a recipe for disaster. The panic attacks will lessen greatly moving forward though.
> 
> Obito will be back next chapter! Thanks so much for the support for the first chapter ;w;


	3. A sudden appearance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naruto goes shopping, weeding, and then reconnects with a friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two weeks exactly! I made a deadline for once...
> 
> Again, comments are always appreciated~

Ino sighs as she finishes sweeping up in front of the shop, dabbing at her forehead with the back of her hand carefully to ensure she didn’t work up a sweat. She might be a shinobi now, but that’s no reason to let her looks to go the wayside, perhaps even moreso now than she was in school because _now_ that stupid Forehead is on Sasuke-kun’s team which puts her way ahead of Ino - and totally unfairly!

She doesn’t really buy the whole “first place, last place” team assignment for Team 7. It’s obvious that her own team was put together only to maintain the tradition of the Ino-Shika-Cho trio, and then you had _all_ of the other clan heirs grouped together in Team 8. With Sasuke, Sakura, and Naruto also on a team together, that left only civilians to be grouped up.

If what Asuma-sensei said is true, and typically only three or so teams pass out of an entire Academy class, then all you have to do is look at what teams have heirs or exceptionally skilled students to see which teams are designed to have the best chances.

It almost seems unfair. She asked her dad about it but all he could do was shrug and tell her that sometimes sacrifices had to be made for Konoha to succeed. He told her that it wasn’t as if Konoha was wasting time on them in the Academy either - if they wanted to, they could pursue non-combat shinobi professions like cryptology, sealing, administration… And if they decided to simply stay civilians, then they had learned survival skills that they could use in case Konoha was ever invaded.

Ino can’t help but wonder, if Sakura wasn’t the first place kunoichi in class thanks to her big brain, would she have still been put on a ‘passing’ team?

After all, in Team 7, Sakura is the odd one out. Sasuke is the last remaining Uchiha, and Naruto is --

She jolts and glances guiltily around, hoping that no one somehow overheard her thoughts. She was born to a clan of _mind readers_. If someone’s going to figure out Naruto’s secret, she hates to say it, but it’ll most likely be from her.

When no one leaps out to arrest her, or starts shrieking in horror, she relaxes.

She still can’t believe it. After they’d passed their test yesterday, she’d gone to the library and started searching out every clue she could find about the Kyuubi attack and everything said the same thing - the Kyuubi had been killed.

But Naruto hadn’t been lying.

The idiotic, clownish boy she’s known for years has a demon inside of him and all of the information about that day has been altered or deleted, and she doesn’t know why. Why did he look so scared to tell them? Like Shikamaru said, the Yondaime wouldn’t make a mistake like that.

But then…

Naruto also said everyone hates him. Mizuki-sensei had even tried to kill him and Iruka-sensei apparently. And Naruto’d cried his eyes out because he was so scared everyone would hate him. What kind of awful life is that?

She sighs and turns to go inside and put the broom away when she spies a shock of red hair slipping out of an alley. She’s never seen hair so red before in her life! It looks almost like a tomato, or a strawberry. The red headed boy looks over at her and brightens.

“Hi Ino!”

He has red hair, pale skin, and a different voice but something about his mannerisms...

“... Naruto?” she calls out incredulously. An old saying pops into her head: _Speak of evil and it shall appear._

He bounds over to her. “How’s your morning going?”

“Are you _not_ wearing orange?” she asks, stunned. He’s got a black shirt with a red spiral on it, and some plain black pants to go with it.

“Er. I actually - I kinda -” Naruto stammers for a second before something clicks in his head and he spits out, “I ruined my jumpsuit in the genin test yesterday! Haha… So… Um… I was going to go buy some new clothes.”

“Why are you using a Henge?” She can’t quite keep the suspicion out of her voice. It would just be like him to use a ninja technique for a prank. _And_ he sounds like he’s lying about the jumpsuit too, although why he would she’s not sure.

He just stares at her silently and tilts his head. She remembers yesterday, him crying over everyone hating him.

“Oh!” She colours a bit. “Right.”

“Yeah."

They stand there awkwardly for a moment before Naruto shrugs his shoulders. “Anyways, how did your test go? Ya pass?”

She plants her hands on her hips and smirks. “Of course! Who do you take me for?” The pride swelling in her thins a little when she thinks about the fact that passing means she’s absolutely stuck with Shikamaru and Chouji for the next few years at _least_. Shaking off the gloom, she asks, “How about you?”

The answer is the one she was expecting. “We passed.”

Well, that about confirms the fact these teams were stacked to pass from the beginning. All she needs to do is hunt down that loudmouth Kiba or one of his weird, quiet teammates and see if they got passed too.

“Well, I’m gonna go now. Congrats on becoming a genin!” Naruto smiles at her, and it’s somehow just as warm and wide even on the stranger’s face he’s wearing.

“Wait!” She hurries inside and puts the broom away, shouting at her father that she’s leaving. Rushing back out, she fixes her hair and motions for him to lead the way. “I’ll come with you and make sure you don’t buy something hideous again.”

Naruto turns sullen. “It wasn’t _hideous…_ ”

“Naruto, please don’t kid yourself. Besides,” she grins slyly, “don’t you want to impress Sakura?”

“Eh… Not really. I think I’m kind of over my crush on her.”

“W-Woah. Really?”

Naruto shrugs and looks down, and she wonders if he’s thinking about the Kyuubi. Sakura is her rival, and secretly still one of her best friends despite their squabbling. She wants to believe in the best parts of Sakura, that she wouldn’t be so quick to judge Naruto for something he can’t help, but even she isn’t sure what Sakura would do. Hopefully, if, or perhaps more accurately _when_ Sakura finds out, it won’t be a total disaster.

“Okay, so no crush. You should still start dressing more respectably! Since you’re a blonde like me, it’s an insult to have you walking around in a total eyesore. You should try out something purple.”

Naruto laughs a bit and eyes her thoughtfully. “I don’t mind if it’s purple but… it has to have _some_ orange.”

She can work with that. She sticks a hand out and he shakes it. “Deal.”

* * *

Oh yeah, she’s still got it. He hadn't sprung for the belly shirt even though she said it would look good on him - she'd wear _her_ stomach uncovered if her dad didn't have a total meltdown about her 'growing up too fast'.

She twirls her finger to motion for him to do one last turn so she can be sure it's all perfect.

Purple jacket, the colour of lavender, a flower which represents grace, serenity, and devotion. Naruto doesn't exactly exemplify those tenets, so maybe the colour will rub off on him and cool his temper a bit. It's got some trimming in orange just like he'd asked for, and honestly it had surprised her they'd even offered it. She's worn some orange in her youth, but it wasn't a colour she thought of very often anymore - to her, orange was a colour singularly suited to Naruto, and she'd avoided wearing it ever since she'd made that mental connection.

He's got the same colour combination for his pants, lavender with a stripe of orange down the sides, and some plain black sandals and his metal net shirt.

"Perfect!"

Naruto laughs. "Wow… You weren't kidding about the purple, huh."

Ino smirks. "Purple looks damn good on us blondes, don't you think? And like I promised, there is _some_ orange." Not very much, but hey. He got what he asked for and not an inch more.

"I kinda wish there was more…" he pouts.

She waves his complaint away easily, buoyed by her pride in managing to get Naruto into something that doesn’t make her fashionista sensibilities weep. "Ah, just get your headband on orange fabric. It'll look more chique if you have the orange as a highlight or accessory rather than the main focus."

He frowns disbelievingly. She folds her arms and dares him to argue against her flawless logic and fashion sense. Everyone gives in eventually.

He sighs at her in defeat. "It's easier just to accept it, isn't it?"

"Yup! But try not to use your red hair Henge too much with this clothing. It looks pretty tacky. Where’d you get the idea for that anyways? I’ve never seen someone with hair like that."

Something curious passes behind Naruto’s eyes, the same odd emotion that she’d seen when they were all in the bathroom at the Academy and he was deciding whether or not to tell them about the Kyuubi.

“... I actually… I found out that my mom had red hair like this,” he says finally. “It’s something the Uzumaki clan is known for I guess.”

Ino blinks in surprise. “Wow… I guess your dad was blonde then, huh?”

Naruto looks distinctly uncomfortable for second before he laughs and shrugs. “Er, yeah, guess so. Anyways, I gotta go! Seeya, Ino!”

Before she can stop him or even say goodbye herself, he’s leaping up onto a roof and scurrying away, hair melding back into natural blonde as he goes. Her gossip sense tingles as she ponders who Naruto’s parents could be. A red-headed Uzumaki woman, and an unknown blonde man. There’s no one she can name off the top of her head that has hair as bright and sunny as Naruto’s, not even in her own clan.

She goes back to her family’s flower shop and spies Shikamaru and Chouji waiting for her - the team had decided to use the store as a gathering point for their first proper day together - and for once, she's actually glad to see them.

In hushed tones, carefully watching out for Asuma or her dad, she tells them what she learned.

* * *

The next day, two days after the bell test, Kakashi brings them to the Hokage tower for their very first D-rank mission. He flushes with a warm joy when Iruka smiles proudly at him.

They get handed a weeding mission and Naruto is stalwart in ignoring Kurama’s jeers about his fall from handling important wartime combat to tackling gardening problems. This is all a part of the plan.

… He hosts a private pity party for himself once they actually get to the garden and start weeding. War hero to zero, just like that.

He swears that the weeds are breeding faster in front of his very eyes. They’ve been here all morning, the sun slowly growing hotter on their backs, a mountain of picked weeds already behind them. Kakashi is off in the shade, slowly flipping through an orange book that Naruto can tell he’s already read at least a few dozen times and the owner of the house is hovering over them, glaring holes through his back, just waiting for a chance to berate his work. He resists the urge to stick his tongue out at her.

Maybe she can read his mind though, because the next instant she’s demanding he go around the back and grab some pails to start hauling the pulled weeds away. It hurts just a bit how cruel her eyes are.

Well… He won’t lie, it’s also actually quite the relief that he can get a breather away from them for a few minutes. It’s still so hard looking at Sasuke, and sometimes he still hears Sakura’s horrified voice in his head, and sometimes he smells Kakashi’s blood in the air when the silver haired nin isn’t in his line of sight. After three days it’s gotten easier already, and he’s managed to get away to somewhere quiet to have his panic attacks each time so far, but it’s only a matter of time until he breaks down in front of them too.

He obediently pulls off his dirtied gloves and steps out of sight of his team and the owner. He spots the buckets just before he’s grabbed from behind, strong arms looping around him, picking him up and pulling him in tightly. One dizzying second later, before he can try to escape, he’s pulled through space-time, landing in a deep part of the forest.

* * *

“Where the hell is that useless brat?” their _darling_ customer spits.

Uchiha glances over his shoulder at her before going back to his work, but Haruno isn’t one to give up the chance to gossip. “Oh, I _know_ , right? He’s so lazy! Making us do all his work.”

The customer, whose name he hadn’t even bothered to learn let alone forget, haughtily informs him, “I’ll tell you this, shinobi-san, I won’t be paying that little cretin even a single ryou for running off while his teammates do all the work for him.”

Kakashi sighs and keeps his eye on his book. _A single drop of that boy’s blood is worth more than your life,_ he thinks somewhat viciously to himself, but he says aloud, “Sakura, why don’t you go and fetch him? Perhaps he got lost…” Or perhaps he’s setting up a prank. Kakashi has always been quite amused by those - the boy had so much creativity that he should’ve been apprenticed to a trapper - but he’ll have to train that tendency out of him, at least while he’s on a job.

The girl shoots an annoyed glare at him and sighs loudly. “Fine.” She tosses her gloves aside and starts examining her hands as she goes around the side of the house, checking for possible callouses if he’s not wrong. Was Rin ever like that? He doesn’t think so. Then again, Rin was raised in a war.

She comes back after a moment with a furrow in her brow. “He’s not there.”

Kakashi flips a page in his book. So, it’s a prank then.

“Kakashi-sensei!” Haruno demands, hands firmly on her hips. “Go get him! Wherever he is, I’m not going to let him skip work. We’re ninja now, not kids. He can’t get away with stupid things like this anymore!”

Really? He'd have thought that Naruto was the one out of all of them who truly understands what being a ninja means regardless of this slip up. Haruno may have been raised by shinobi parents, and the Uchiha may have been raised to a point by a ninja clan, but it was Naruto who saw to the core of his test and who accepted the reality of dying for a teammate. He has the blood of two of the most faithful shinobi Konoha has ever been graced with. It’s in his very nature.

The customer harrumphs at the girl's words and nods approvingly.

Why did he agree to take this team again…? Oh, right, the council would have eaten him alive if he’d sent the Uchiha boy back. And he supposes seeing Minato-sensei’s son every day, as painful as it is to see so much of his parents (and Obito) in him, is worth it too.

He gets up from his rather comfortable spot and makes sure to giggle pervertedly into his book as he passes the two women just to get a dig in. They splutter in anger and he turns the corner of the house. He’ll start tracking the boy from here. His footsteps are a bit muddled by the girl’s but he can note the slightly larger and more defined prints heading straight to the back area where the customer had indicated the buckets to be. The footsteps stop in front of them, and then…

…

He puts his book away.

Crouching down, he slowly traces the outline of the footprint right behind Naruto’s. It’s definitely a shinobi sandal, and far too big of a print to be left by either Naruto or the girl. Looking further, there are no tracks of either this mysterious ninja coming in, nor of them or Naruto walking away.

Naruto’s scent is barely there, mostly washed away by the breeze, and he smells Haruno’s shampoo, the same as Pakkun’s, but his nose isn’t quite good enough to distinguish the third person. A curdling feeling sits heavily in his stomach. He leaps up on the roof for more of a vantage point, but he can’t see any proof of Naruto coming up around this way. Back down on the ground, he sees absolutely no disturbance of the brush in the tree line around them. Naruto might be more skilled than he’d let on in the Academy, but leaving no tracks? No scent? That’s not something a genin can do.

He sticks a thumb into his kunai pouch and pricks it before summoning one of his dogs.

“Yo, Kakashi,” Pakkun greets, raising a paw.

“Pakkun, Naruto was just here,” Kakashi points. “Help me find him, will you?"

Used to his brusqueness, his summon shifts into mission mode and sniffs around the area. He snuffles the ground where Naruto had stood, then follows the trail back to the garden in front.

The customer and his other two students send him curious glances, even the Uchiha. Pakkun goes to where Naruto had left his gloves. He looks at Kakashi and tilts his head in confusion.

“Kakashi, the trail here is even older.”

The girl screeches and flings herself away from the dog. “T-T-Talking - !” She flings her hand out and points dramatically. “A talking dog!”

“Ah, you’re the one who smells like my shampoo,” Pakkun replies tartly before turning back to Kakashi and ignoring the suddenly crushed looking girl. “The freshest scent came from the area where you summoned me, but there’s nothing leading away from it from there.”

With a very deliberately controlled voice he asks, “Pakkun, you’re absolutely sure there was no trail leading away from the back?”

Pakkun must note the strain he can’t manage to completely hide. “Let’s check again.”

This time the other three tag along with him to the side of the house where the small shed with the buckets is as though it’s a sideshow. Irritation burns the back of his throat when the customer snidely remarks about the boy’s laziness again but he swallows it down. He sharply tells them to stay away from the front of it where the footprints are.

Pakkun duly sniffs around the area, around the trees’ edge, the house, but he comes back negative.

Kakashi kneels down and points at the larger set of prints. “Whose scent do these belong to?”

The dog snuffles it and sneezes. “What a weird smell, like sap and blood mixed together. It doesn’t smell like anyone I know, and just like Naruto’s scent, it completely vanishes from this point. Heck, I can’t even smell it arriving. It wasn’t a Shunshin… It’s like they just teleported, or fell out of the sky.”

This can’t be happening. He’s had responsibility for Naruto for all of three days and on this, their very first D-rank of all things… He’s heard of the C-rank curse, not that he really believes in it, but Naruto was supposed to be safe inside of the village walls. Ignored and hated, perhaps, and treated not all that well at times, but _safe_ from lethal threat. His true identity had been hidden from birth in order to keep him protected from Iwa. Kakashi had even been ordered to kill his heart and stay far, far away from the boy until at least his graduation from the Academy in order to prevent anyone from drawing a connection between him and the boy who looks so very much like the late Yondaime.

_And yet._

He’ll never be able to face Sensei or Kushina-san if Naruto dies under his watch.

“Sakura, Sasuke, you are dismissed. Go home.” He glares at the customer when she goes to talk and she shuts her mouth so quickly her teeth click. “This mission is hereby abandoned. You may resubmit your request to the mission’s desk.” Turning to his summon, he says, “Pakkun, head to the Hokage and tell him of what you’ve found, and that it is my belief that Naruto has been captured by an unknown nin. I’m going to go with the rest of the pack and begin searching this quadrant. If support is granted, lead them to me for further instructions.”

Pakkun nods his head and bounds away as quickly as he can go.

“Kakashi-sensei, what do you mean Naruto’s been -”

“Sakura,” he cuts in sharply. “Go home. _Now._ That’s a direct order.”

 _I don’t have time to deal with you,_ he wants to snarl, but she’s still just a child. She doesn’t understand that every second is vital. She doesn’t understand that Naruto could be dead already if Iwa had discovered the blood connection between him and the Yondaime, and that the next time she would see her cheerful teammate would be him lying in his coffin, pale and cold.

He slices his finger again and quickly summons the best trackers of his pack.

* * *

Cool ceramic nuzzles the side of his neck. Out of the corner of his eye he spots an orange, swirled mask and short brown hair.

“... You kinda scared me just now,” Naruto admits, heart thudding in his chest with panic-fueled adrenaline.

Obito hums.

“Are you gonna put me down?”

Obito shakes his head, rubbing the mask against his neck and sending goosebumps shooting down his back, and instead of putting him down tightens his grip. He sighs and wiggles a bit in the tight hold. It’s not exactly comfortable being held like this, like he’s an oversized teddy bear, legs dangling in the air. He’d forgotten how short he was when he was twelve.

He reaches an arm up and pets Obito’s hair. “It’s okay now, Obito. I’m not going anywhere. Let’s sit down.”

After a moment of consideration, Obito sits down, carefully situating him on his lap.

_Not great, but at least a step in the right direction._

But when he considers his situation… he’s too old to be sitting on a man’s lap like this! It’s really embarrassing! Inside, Kurama struggles between laughter at his embarrassment and anger at the presumptuousness of the ‘Uchiha scum’. With a sigh of defeat, he turns in the embrace until he’s sitting sideways across the man’s lap, the dark eye hole of the mask watching him as he does.

… Yeah, that’s kinda freaky. “I’m going to take your mask off, alright?”

Obito quietly allows him to push it up and off his head.

His jaw drops and the mask tumbles out of his numb fingers. _Red._ So much red… Without thinking, he reaches out to touch Obito’s face but is stopped by the scarred man’s hands grabbing hold of his wrists. “What the hell did you do to yourself?!” Dried blood cakes the right side of his face and some fresh tracks from the Sharingan eye ooze out.

“I had to get here,” Obito says quietly with an intense expression, red eye swirling. “I had to make sure you were here, that this was real. If you weren’t…” The many potential ends to that sentence hang like a heavy cloud over them.

He feels the tremors in the body underneath him now, sees the deep bruise-like shadow under the left eye, the exhaustion in every line of his body. “Obito… Damn it. Let me...” He pulls his sleeve down over his hand and goes to wipe the blood away.

“Don’t,” Obito grimaces, pushing his hands away again.

Time to pull out the big guns. He puts his hands firmly on his hips and glares at him with the kind of look that says _‘I know better than you, so there!’_ It always works for Sakura. Although, admittedly, she never happened to use the hands-on-hips pose while she was sitting in someone's lap.

Obito purses his lips. Naruto frowns harder and refuses to blink. Obito sighs, corners of his mouth turning down and twisting his scars, then obligingly tilts the bloodied side of his face. “Fine. Ruin your jacket for all I care.”

“I will, thanks!” Naruto chirps, and carefully starts wiping away at the blood tracks, taking care to be gentle with the deeper scar marks. Once satisfied, he leans back. “That’s better. Be more careful with that eye, will you? You have to take care of yourself.”

Obito shrugs and loops his arms back around him, curling in until they’re sharing the same breath.

The reality of the situation _finally_ hits him.

He’s not alone.

He struggles not to cry like a baby again but he can’t quite manage it and sobs into Obito’s shoulder. The smell of him is the same as it was before, sort of earthy and sweet, undercut with blood. It’s extremely comforting. The warmth of the closeness of their bodies seeps under his skin and into his bones.

“I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad...”

Obito’s response is the soft presses of lips across his forehead, dry kisses peppering his face.

When Naruto calms, Obito tilts them to the side and slowly leads them to the ground.

He squirms into a comfortable position on the grassy forest floor, moving Obito’s false arm into place to use as a pillow. “So where did you run here from?”

“Kiri.”

“Kiri, huh?” Naruto shuts his eyes and enjoys a cool breeze that soothes the building heat of the summer sun. He sees Haku and Zabuza’s faces, Mei with her fiery hair and temper, and a man who looks like a boy with a crushing burden that had been used against him and the country he wanted dearly to protect. “Leave Yagura alone, okay?”

A gloved hand curls around his face, thumb stroking over his whisker marks and tear tracks. “I can make him do what you want.”

He cracks an annoyed eye open against the wave of sleepiness washing over him. “I _want_ you to leave him alone. He seemed like a good guy… And I think he could be a good partner for Isobu. Promise me.”

Obito bites the tip of his finger and pulls his glove off with his teeth before throwing it aside, then trails a warm fingertip over his brow with a touch so feathery soft that he barely feels it. It takes longer than Naruto would like for Obito to whisper, “Alright.”

His eye slips shut again. “Good.”

A comfortable quiet envelops them, only the whispering of the trees around them and the birds fluttering through them breaking it. The natural earthy smell of the grass and the ground mixing with Obito’s own smell of sweet sap and artificial wood, as well as the soothing touch tracing his face and running through his hair, lull him nearly to sleep. His sleep had been disturbed the past few nights with nightmares of the dark shadow lurking in the waters of his mind, and with hours of insomnia filled with doubt over whether he was truly in the past or whether he was deep inside of a new dream. With Obito as a comforting weight next to him, he feels centred.

When he manages to pull his eyes open again, Obito is still watching him with unblinking concentration, red eyes swirling and recording. It’s unnerving being at the centre of such undivided focus.

“Aren’t you tired?”

“I can manage.”

“Fine,” he huffs, knowing a losing battle with the Uchiha when he sees one. “But I’m going to have a nap.”

“Sleep well,” Obito murmurs with softness in his voice and his touch.

* * *

The sun is burning low in the sky by the time Kakashi gets a whiff of his wayward student, deep in the depths of the trees at the very edge of Konoha’s walls. The fur on the backs of his dogs bristles, and they run towards the origin of the scent as silently as a shadow.

“Kakashi,” Pakkun informs quietly as they near, “the smell of blood and sap is strong here. The enemy must be close.”

Kakashi’s eye briefly closes. He reaches up and moves his hitai-ate out of the way. _Obito… Help me see the way to save Naruto._ With a quick hand sign he flickers to a tree near where the two scents originate from. He carefully peers down, all senses on high alert for the enemy, but all he spies is Naruto sleeping at the base of a tree. The boy looks unharmed, his chest rising and falling at a slow pace and the look on his face peaceful. Kakashi watches him turn over in his sleep and he sees the other half of the boy’s body.

There’s blood on his sleeve.

To hell with caution. He leaps down and the pack follows, spreading out and searching for the enemy’s trail.

“That smell is all over him,” Pakkun notes with a protective growl. This close, Kakashi can smell it too. Something about it makes his chest pang with a sense of nostalgia but he’s sure he’s never smelled anything quite like it before. It reminds him somewhat of Tenzou who always has the aroma of freshly cut branches, but this is slightly inhuman.

“The blood isn’t Naruto’s,” Pakkun announces. “It’s the enemy’s. It reeks of chakra, but… It’s strange. Some of it’s old, at least a day or two.”

Another of his pack, Guruko, bounds back into the clearing. “Kakashi, we covered the immediate area around here but we couldn’t find anything. We thought maybe he dug underground but we couldn’t find any leads.”

“Damn,” Pakkun curses. “He just vanished again?”

 _It’s really that easy,_ Kakashi thinks dully to himself. If the enemy had wanted to, Naruto would be dead and they’d be long gone without even a hint as to where they’d vanished to. Naruto had been damned to a lonely life where he couldn’t even know who his parents were so that he’d be safe, and yet here was the undeniable proof he hadn’t been safe at all. The village that was supposed to protect him had failed. _He’d_ failed.

Carefully he picks the boy up and heads back to the Hokage tower, letting his pack be the ones to inform his back-up - mostly Hyuuga and Inuzuka shinobi - that the target had been located.

* * *

“I don’t really want to wake up,” Naruto sweatdrops as he feels his body get settled down onto something soft. Based on Kakashi’s movement after finding him and the familiar smokey smell of where he is now, he’d bet on Sandaime-jiji’s office.

“You’ll have to wake up sooner or later,” Kurama says dismissively, tails swishing behind him in poorly disguised amusement.

“Yeah, I know, but… Argh!” He rakes his fingers through his hair roughly, running his mind back through the past few hours. “Obito, damn iiit! What am I going to say?! ‘Sorry, I got kidnapped, oh well'?!”

“That’s what you get for making your bed with an Uchiha: madness and irrationality. Now you must lie in it, brat.”

Naruto shoots him a dirty look through the bars of the cage. “Don’t sound so _smug_ about it.” Kurama just grins toothily at him. “And anyways, how was I supposed to expect him to grab me out of nowhere?”

Flashes of the odd intensity and desperation in Obito’s red eyes come back to him, the way the man had clung onto him for hours, tracing his face with his unscarred hand.

In the Tsukuyomi, Naruto had held him frequently after Kaguya visited nightmares upon the Uchiha, leading Obito back to himself after the blood-soaked vision of Rin’s death was replayed a thousand times over. It hadn’t always been easy, but Naruto hadn’t been able to give up on one of his only allies within the dream. But even then, Obito hadn’t been quite like _that_. Maybe towards the end, or maybe after a particularly bad nightmare, one of the nightmares that Obito wouldn’t share with him, but… This time had felt especially raw.

He reasons that it was due to their uncertainty, not knowing if they had come back alone. Even if it’s biting him in the ass now, Naruto can’t truly say he regrets Obito snatching him out from under Kakashi’s nose in the middle of a mission.

Kurama makes a low grumbling noise in the back of his throat and rolls his eyes, like he can’t even believe he has to explain. “He’s an _Uchiha_. They aren’t right in the head; it’s those cursed eyes. You should know better than anyone that once they pick something to get obsessed with that’s all they can think about. You should feel lucky he even left you there.”

Naruto massages his temples in an attempt to stave off the headache building behind his eyes. “Obito isn’t obsessing over me.”

“Naruto, you are my partner and my friend, and as such it is my duty to inform you that you are a moron.”

“What?!”

“You, the very same person who did not know that milk-eyed girl was in love with you until she said it right to your face, the same person who did not realize that you yourself were in love with that bastard reincarnation of Indra until the dream showed you - _you_ claim to tell _me_ what your Uchiha pet does or does not feel?”

Naruto opens his mouth, feels his face flood red, and then closes it. He turns his back on the cage and plops down in the bloody water. “Whatever!” he says hotly. “You’re wrong and I’m waking up now!”

Kurama’s snort of amusement follows him into the waking world.

Cautiously, he cracks an eye open. It’s definitely the Hokage’s office, and - yep. Kakashi and Sandaime-jiji are both looking at him. So much for stealth. The Hokage’s posture is deceptively loose, but Naruto can feel the power radiating from him in restrained anger, and Kakashi looks rather like he’d enjoy killing the first person to look at him wrong. Not a great situation to be in, all things considered.

“You’re safe, Naruto-kun,” the Saindaime says kindly, motioning him to sit up and come over. “We were rather worried about you. Do you remember what happened?”

“Um…” Damn, this is embarrassing. He instinctively reaches up to scratch the back of his neck and notices his jacket is missing. “Where’s -?”

“It had blood on it, so we felt best to remove it before you woke up,” the Sandaime explains.

“Oh…” Yeah, that’s right. He’d wiped Obito’s face with it. Ino will be _so_ pissed at him that he got the jacket she picked out for him dirty already. “Did… did you find him?”

Kakashi shifts a bit and looks away from him, a hard line of tension defining his shoulders, but it’s the Sandaime who answers, “No, unfortunately. The Barrier Corps did not report any disturbances and the teams sent to retrieve you could not find the trail of the person who took you. We were hoping you could help give us some clues.”

“Ah, well… Okay.” _Not okay._ He scrunches his nose up and tries doubly hard to pretend to be a useless genin. “So you want me to tell you, like, what he looked like?”

“That would be a big help,” the Hokage smiles kindly, but his eyes remain sharp. The Professor is the one looking at him right now, and it’s almost unsettling seeing it paired with his grandfatherly smile.

Naruto thinks for a moment. He has to be careful not to give too much away, but he can’t hold back without them potentially getting suspicious either. “Well, I’m pretty sure it was a guy. Um, he was pretty tall. About as tall as Kakashi-sensei, I guess. He had all dark clothes on, and a mask. And he had short hair. I guess that’s it."

Sandaime-jiji and Kakashi share a look. “A mask, Naruto-kun? Would you mind describing it?”

“Sure. It wasn’t an ANBU mask if that’s what you’re thinking. It was orange and spirally.” He cracks a grin, “I guess it looked kinda cool, ‘cause it was orange, ya know…”

His effort to break the tense mood falls about a mile short.

“And can you tell me how exactly he took you?” the Professor asks, voice harder now. “Kakashi-kun impressed upon me that this man somehow took you while he was less than a few metres away, without a struggle, and without leaving a trail of any kind.”

Yikes. No wonder Kakashi looks so tense; it must’ve been a hard blow to his pride when he couldn’t track Naruto and Obito down.

“Well,” he drawls, pressing a finger to his forehead and thinking hard. How to describe Kamui… “I was standing there, right in front of those stupid buckets that lady wanted me to get, and then all of a sudden someone grabbed me from behind and then… I don’t really know how to describe it. It sorta felt like my stomach was getting turned inside out, then I was in the middle of a bunch of trees with that guy still holding onto me.”

The Hokage nods slowly, considering the information. “So, he grabbed you with both hands? Did you see him use any hand seals?”

He shakes his head.

“Did he say what he wanted with you? Did he take any offensive actions against you at all? Did he have a hitai-ate that indicated his village affiliation?” Sandaime-jiji fires at him in quick succession.

His mouth quirks into a half smile before he can stop himself. This is kinda fun, playing a game of cat and mouse where no one knew he was both the cat and the mouse at once. “No, no, and no. All he did was keep me there for awhile. He sorta… um… I guess he touched me - not in a pervert way!” he quickly amends at the stormy looks that cross the two men’s faces. “He was just - holding me, I guess?”

That clearly throws the two of them for a loop. Why go through all the trouble of taking him, only to end up doing nothing hostile at all?

“Alright, Naruto-kun. Thank you. Lastly, I was wondering about the blood that we found on your jacket. Can you explain what happened? Did you attack him?”

Naruto pauses again, trying to find a way to half-truth his way out of this one.

He hesitates for just a bit too long, and the Hokage takes a step closer, one hand reaching out for his shoulder. It takes a lot of willpower not to flinch away. “I won’t be upset no matter what the reason is.”

Bless the Sandaime for only expecting the best from him, instead of getting suspicious about the whole situation like any decent shinobi would. _And_ it gives him an idea.

“You promise you won’t get mad?” Naruto asks, forcing a quiver into his voice.

“Of course,” the Sandaime smiles warmly.

“Well… He had blood on his mask coming from the eye hole. I think it was his, and so… I wiped it off for him.” Sandaime-jiji’s eyebrows shoot up and Kakashi makes an odd movement in the corner of his eye. “He didn’t seem like a bad guy! He didn’t hurt me at all! So, I felt bad and wanted to… Agh, I knew you’d get mad, ‘ttebayo!” He crosses his arms and huffs poutily.

“No, no, not mad,” the Hokage laughs, “in fact, I commend you for your kind-heartedness and your bravery. But don’t forget, this man could still be very dangerous; just because he didn’t attack you this time, there’s nothing saying he won’t next time - that is if there even will be a next attempt. If you ever see him again, do not attempt to engage him, alright?”

_‘Dangerous’... More than you know, old man, just not to me._

“Sure!” he says agreeably anyways. “I’ll run away from him if I can. But he’s got a tight grip, ya know.”

“That’s all we can ask for. Now, I’m going to have a small ANBU guard follow you for the next few days, just to make sure that this man won’t return. But, I don’t want you to worry. Konoha will protect its own.” The Sandaime nods his head towards the still silent Kakashi. “Kakashi-kun will escort you home, just to be extra safe.”

Naruto allows himself to be ushered out of the room. _Holy shit, did I really just get away with that? I… am awesome._

" _For as dense and straightforward as you usually are, you can be unnaturally good at manipulation. You were, as you say, ‘awesome’_ ,” Kurama compliments him with the tone of a proud father. Naruto beams inwardly and tries to stop from puffing up in pride on the outside.

It’s rather late as he and Kakashi leave the tower and start walking towards his apartment. Most people are inside their own homes by now, with a few bars and restaurants along the way still active with unruly civilians or off-duty shinobi. A few times, Kakashi reaches towards his kunai and shuriken pouches, entire body tense, before he relaxes ever-so-slightly again. They’re already halfway there when Naruto finally notices he isn’t even reading his book.

“Um, Kakashi-sensei, are you okay?”

Kakashi looks down at him and nods sharply. There’s no humour in his face at all. This isn't like the copy-nin. Even in the middle of a battle he always keeps his calm and makes quips, but now he's jumping at shadows and looking like the grave.

Naruto frowns and stops walking, Kakashi halting immediately with him. “You don’t seem okay.”

“Naruto, I’d like to get you home as soon as possible. Leave the questions for tomorrow.”

“Alright,” he consents quietly, feeling awkward in the tense silence between them. Ugh, he has to say _something_ , it’s killing him. He blurts out the first thing to come to his head. “I’m sorry that the mission was a failure. Our first mission, _weeding_ , failed ‘cause…” _‘Cause I made friends with your presumed KIA teammate-turned terrorist-turned reformed terrorist from the future._ As if he could say that. "'Cause of me, I guess."

He barely catches the indecipherable look Kakashi shoots him. He’s not sure how to interpret it so he just stares at the ground and tries to ignore the feeling of so many eyes on the back of his neck. The ANBU are going to be hell to get used to.

They walk on in silence for a bit longer until they reach his apartment door. Naruto unlocks the door and hesitates at the threshold. Is he supposed to invite him in or what? Kakashi solves that conundrum for him by shouldering his way into Naruto’s small main room, eye roaming around, and occasionally sniffing the air.

“... What are you doing?”

Kakashi doesn’t even look his way as he starts rifling through kitchen drawers and cabinets, even checking under his plants and inside his fridge. He stops once to look at the old blood stains that Naruto had left there after the bell test when his mind had been hazy and lost to despair.

“I, uh, accidentally hurt myself with a kunai.” He laughs stiffly. “I guess I’m kinda clumsy.”

Kakashi gives him a suspicious glance but lets it go as he turns and prowls through the bathroom and even his bedroom.

“Yeah, no, that’s fine, just go ahead and look wherever you like! Not like I have any privacy or anything,” Naruto grumbles under his breath as Kakashi pokes through the scrolls littering the ground near his bed.

“Right now you don't."

Naruto jumps in surprise and colours. “Oops. You heard that?”

His window goes under inspection next, deft fingers tracing around the frame and checking for something. “You don’t seem to understand the situation you were in today,” Kakashi says in a tone that seems outwardly conversational but he’s known the Copycat for long enough to tell he’s _very_ unhappy.

His self-preservation instinct tells him to shut up and let Kakashi do his thing, but he’s never been good at listening to that part of himself. “I know - I heard Sandaime-jiji. I get that I could’ve been in trouble, but I _wasn’t._ ”

“Yes, in fact you could have died,” Kakashi replies flatly.

Naruto watches him carefully kneel down and check underneath his bed and suddenly things click into place. “Are you checking for traps?”

“Good job, Naruto!” Kakashi coos over his shoulder like Naruto’s a toddler that’s only just managed to figure out how to count to ten.

The dark shape under the bloody water moves - Kurama shifts uneasily in response, and his stomach turns with nausea.

His day looks like this: Everyone hates him again, Obito kidnapped him, he failed his very first mission in this lifetime, the Sandaime has ANBU watching his every movement, the dark thing in his head is moving around, and _Kakashi is checking under his bed for the bogeyman like he’s a child._

Suddenly he’s not in the mood to be nice anymore.

“You’re checking for traps,” Naruto says again, pushing every last ounce of the roiling frustration that’s bubbling up in his stomach into his words. “You think that the guy who grabbed me right out from under your nose is going to bother with traps? You think that this is going to do _anything_ except make _you_ feel better?” Kakashi expression turns angry but Naruto barrels right over him. “You said I didn’t understand the situation I was in, but I _do_! I understand that _you_ couldn’t have done a damn thing to save me if he’d really wanted me dead, or if he’d really wanted to take me away from Konoha. _That’s_ what I understand, Kakashi.”

Kakashi stares at him silently for a long minute. He stands up from the bed and walks past him and out of the apartment without another word, the front door clicking shut quietly behind him.

_... I think I just fucked up._

“ _It was the truth,_ ” Kurama assures him. It doesn’t make him feel much better.

Only a minute or two later, Obito warps into existence behind him. Naruto just washes his face and brushes his teeth and tries to pretend everything is okay. Obito crawls under the covers with him and they sleep curled up against one another for mutual comfort in his too-little bed. If the ANBU are watching, they don't notice anything amiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay... yes I changed his outfit. There's an in fic reason he can't wear the jumpsuit anymore, I swear! But also I just think he'd look cute in purple okay. Let me live my life.
> 
> I'm realizing more and more how this fic is expanding into a big world-building monster and less of the angsty cutesy thing I had planned at first. Hopefully that appeals to some of you ;u;
> 
> btws, if any of you want to chat I'm on tumblr at rin-stan!


	4. Old enemy, new ally

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New connections are discovered and the beginnings of a plan start to form.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops, that took longer than I expected. thank you to everyone who commented or left kudos! Let me know what you think about the new chapter <3

Obito sleeps tangled up with his Atlas, his shoes, mask and coat stored aside in a mimicry of something homely, and a firm web of genjutsu placed so that no one can see him inside.

He dreams of a dream.

_“Wake up, Obito,” a kind voice urges._

_He can feel the sun on his face, warm and welcoming, and he really just wants to stay asleep but a firm hand shakes his shoulder. Slowly coming to, he blearily opens his eyes and sees a mountain of paperwork. Picking his head up he blinks until his visions clears of sleep and sees -_

_His breath catches in his throat._

_Rin._

_It hasn’t gotten any easier seeing her even after a hundred times._

_She laughs at him, her brown eyes crinkling cutely at the edges and her hair haloed by the sun. With two fingers she reaches out and peels a sheet of paper off the side of his face. “Good morning, sleepy head.” Shaking her head she schools her expression into a playfully scolding one. “What kind of Hokage sleeps on the job?”_

_He watches her quietly with an ache in his chest that feels distinctly similar to the Chidori that he had baited Kakashi into striking him with, the very same technique that had ripped Rin’s life away from her._

_“Obito?” she blinks when he doesn’t respond to her teasing. “You okay?” She bends down and presses the inside of her wrist against his forehead. “You don’t feel too warm…”_

_“I’m fine,” he gets out through the tightness in his throat._

_When she pulls her wrist away he sees the wedding band on her finger. She runs her hand down the right side of his face - there are no scars lining his skin and his eyes flutter shut with the twisting pain in his heart. This is what should have been._ This _is the life he should have had. This is the peaceful world he had wanted so badly he’d been willing to upturn the Elemental Nations for it, had soaked his hands in blood for it._

 _“This_ is _the life you have,” Rin smiles at him, answering his unspoken grief, her brown hair framing her face perfectly in the sunlight filtering into his office._

_“It’s not real.”_

_“It can be. It can be real if you want it to be.”_

_Not for the first time he wants to surrender and let himself be taken fully in by the dream. His hand reaches out without his permission, aching to touch her, to hold her and stroke her hair and hear her laughter again… But this isn’t really Rin. His Rin is somewhere very far away, in the Pure Land, and he’ll never see her again. When he dies, he’ll be destined for a place much worse than where she is._

_And besides, Naruto is waiting for him. He’ll need Obito’s help to undo the genjutsu. Naruto needs him to remain strong. If he’s still fighting, then Obito has no excuses._

_Rin tilts her head consideringly. “Your desires when you first came here were… Me, your adoring wife who you love dearly. You, the Hokage who protects his village. Kakashi, Minato and Kushina as your supporting family that acknowledges and supports you. This is the secret wish you held in your heart all those years you worked hard to bring the Infinite Tsukuyomi to completion. But your desires have changed because of Asura…” She claps her hands and the world shifts._

_He finds himself outside of the office this time with a hand on the handle of the door. Rin is gone. He pauses there for a moment, before sighing and opening the door, morbid curiosity getting the better of him._

_“Obito!” a vibrant voice greets him. Naruto sits behind the Hokage desk, waving excitedly at him, formal robes flapping. He looks like an excited puppy._

_Before he even manages to close the door behind him Naruto is bouncing towards him with that glowing smile on his face, the one so wide and bright his eyes curve shut and his whisker marks curl around his cheeks. His mouth almost ticks up into a smile on reflex._

_“I missed you,” Naruto pouts cutely, reminding Obito of when the blond was much smaller and always using his doe eyes to sucker Kushina-san into - no, stop, those memories aren’t_ real - _and Naruto slings his arms around Obito._

_“We saw each other this morning,” Obito says without thinking and instinctively he knows that’s what the dream wanted him to say. He returns the embrace, humming in satisfaction in the back of his throat. Naruto has always felt like a furnace and the warmth of his touch feels unbelievably soothing, like he’d been freezing cold and hadn’t noticed it until Naruto had begun to thaw him._

_“Too long,” Naruto argues and then firmly kisses him on the mouth._

_A thrill runs down his spine, goosebumps prickling on his skin. His body leans into it, kissing back before his mind finally catches up and he drops his arms from the hug, sharply pushing Naruto away from him. What the hell was that?_

“Your desires have changed because of Asura.”

_No. No, no, no -_

_Naruto looks confused at his reaction and reaches up to hold his face. He feels the scars, now, lining the right side of his body and they ache ever so slightly as Naruto strokes over them with such gentle care that it hurts._

_“Obito?”_

_“W-Why do I look like this?” This isn’t right. He shouldn’t have the scars he got from the Third War. In all of the dreams he’s had with Rin, his body has always been whole and unharmed._

_“Because you want me to accept you completely. And I do,” dream-Naruto responds, warm hands cradling his face like he’s something to be treasured. “All your flaws. All the things you’ve done. It’s all okay now. You don’t have to hide any part of yourself from me.”_

_He struggles to breathe._

_Naruto kisses him again, soft and sweet, and he lets it happen. He lets it happen over and over again, his body suddenly starving for every last touch that he’s spared._

_He never wants to wake up._

The soft, blurry bliss of the memory drifts away from him as he awakens in the small bed with a precious boy cradled safely in his arms. He remembers feeling distinctly as though he’d cut off a limb when he’d finally convinced himself to turn away from that dream. It had gotten harder and harder as he’d gone on. The only thing that had kept him going was the knowledge that the real Naruto needed him. He wouldn’t let his selfish heart get in the way of that.

It’s worth it, in the end. His perseverance is rewarded with the warm acceptance Naruto gives him, the gentle way he had cleaned his face of blood and the trusting way he sleeps next to him, completely at ease.

Perhaps, he thinks as Naruto snuggles further against him in his sleep, that dream of his can still come true.

* * *

For the first time in this old-new life, Naruto feels truly rested as he wakes up. It’s warm, he’s in that _perfect_ position of comfort that you sometimes magically find just a minute before your alarm goes off, and someone is gently running their fingers through his hair -

Wait.

Naruto blinks his eyes open and sees a black shirt over a broad chest. He tips his head back and meets a pair of red eyes. Seriously, doesn’t it take a lot of chakra to keep the Sharingan up constantly?

“Morning,” he says instead of scolding Obito for using his eyes so much.

Obito’s scars shift as his expression melts into a soft smile.

He feels the ANBU outside switch out with a new guard. “Did you do something to make them not notice you?”

“Just genjutsu.”

For a moment he marvels at how unsettlingly easy it is for Obito to get away with everything. Kamui to get into the city without alerting the Barrier Corps, and a genjutsu or two to prevent himself from being seen… With the Mangekyou, he’s a mile ahead of even the best ANBU officer.

No wonder it was so easy for him to unseal Kurama from his mom. No wonder it was so easy for him to rile up the Uchiha and then kill them all. No wonder it was so easy to ruin his life -

The shadow under the bloody water moves in response to his darkening mood, so he shoves those thoughts as far down as he can. Instead he plasters a smile on his face like he always does and asks, “Do you want to get up now?”

Obito clings to him as they get out of bed, halfways carrying him around like a stuffed animal again. He pouts and decides to just put up with it.

In the past few days, he’d gotten groceries with his Nagato-henge so he cooks up some food, struggling around Obito’s constant presence. They fall into a sort of pattern, moving around one another while maintaining the physical touch his friend seems to need. Kurama complains the entire time, irritably telling Naruto to shove the Uchiha away - Naruto ignores him with practiced ease.

When the cooking is done, he finds a compromise of holding hands and sitting side by side during his breakfast because he _refuses_ to sit in Obito’s lap again. That was simply too embarrassing. Obito doesn’t eat anything, mumbling something about Hashirama’s cells.

Afterwards his morning routine continues to pass jaggedly as Naruto tries to incorporate Obito’s needs, drawing a line here or there for privacy’s sake.

“ _Good_ ,” Kurama approves vehemently as Naruto tells Obito to find something to amuse himself while he takes a shower. “ _Keep that Uchiha scum away from you. Who knows what he’d do._ ”

Naruto takes a look down at himself and notes the smooth skin with no hint of when he’d stabbed himself, but mostly he examines the last traces of baby fat still lingering on his hips and stomach, the muscles not yet defined or trained as they had been in his sixteen year old body.

“It’s kinda… um, weird of you to say that when I look twelve…”

“ _Twelve, sixteen, it doesn’t matter. He’s scum. He’ll take advantage of you._ ”

Naruto shakes his head at the undue protectiveness in Kurama’s voice and almost laughs outright at the image he’s painting. Is this what his dad would’ve been like if he’d lived…? Overbearing and overprotective?

He laughs in surprise as Kurama purrs happily at that thought.

* * *

“I want you to stay.”

Obito sits on the edge of his bed, arms crossed and mouth twisted down. If he wasn’t a fully grown man, Naruto would liken him to a pouting child whose favourite playmate is leaving.

“It’s not like I really want to go either,” he sighs. His argument with Kakashi plays in his head and he cringes at his harsh words again. It’s going to be _so_ awkward seeing Kakashi again after last night. “But I probably should.”

“You don’t need Kakashi.”

That makes him pause. “No,” he agrees slowly, feeling that was rather obvious. “I don’t. But that’s not my point.”

“So you’re going for Sasuke.” There’s a tight undercurrent in Obito’s voice that sets him slightly on edge.

He tries to find the laid explosive note he senses in the conversation, but can’t quite pinpoint which issue will prime it to explode. Kakashi? Or Sasuke? What exactly is it that Obito is getting upset over?

“I won’t deny that it’s nice to see them again.” It’s more like torture, actually - but it’s a torture he’s willingly submitting himself to. “I mean, it’s hard but… It’s nice.”

“‘Nice’, is it?” Obito looks away from him, expression turning pinched. “Nice seeing the person who tried to kill you?”

Reflexively, he puts a hand over the spot where Sasuke had run him through.

He feels it still. Phantom pains, Sakura would tell him. He remembers her talking about it when she’d been dealing with a patient who had lost his hand. The patient had been bent over with pain in a hand that was no longer there, trying to unclench a fist that was gone, unable to convince his mind of reality. In his chest there’s invisible scar tissue that throbs and pulls when he thinks about it too hard, sitting there like a weight.

Funnily enough, Obito is probably the only other person alive who understands what that pain feels like.

He stops himself from pointing out the hypocrisy, that Obito had tried to kill him too.

“All three of them are precious people that I care about. But at the same time, all three of them…” Naruto feels that aching phantom wound pulse. “They’re all gone. They aren’t the same people… Maybe I’ll never have the same bonds with them. I’m trying to accept that. I want to be selfish, just a little. It’s okay, right?” He ignores the tinge of desperation in his voice.

Obito looks pained and turns back to him with dark eyes. “... You deserve to have whatever you want.”

“I’ll definitely stop _her_ from coming back. I swear. I won’t let those things happen again, no matter what. We’ll do it together, okay? … Okay?” Naruto waits until he nods. “It won’t be for long. Just a little while.”

Obito drops his gaze but the tension stays between them. “I’ll wait.”

* * *

It’s oddly thrilling to have someone to say goodbye to, not just his plants. He’s not sure yet if Obito is planning on sticking around or not, but if he is, when he comes home he’ll have someone to welcome him back. Grinning wide enough to make his face hurt he opens his front door and feels the wind blow right out of his sails.

“Good morning, Naruto-sa-” Kabuto’s voice cuts off as his dark eyes raise past him and lock right onto Obito sans mask. After a moment of tension passes between the three of them, Kabuto flicks his gaze back to Naruto’s, closes his mouth, and waits, his entire body projecting the fact he could and _would_ attack at the slightest sign.

He laughs awkwardly to break the tension and turns back to his houseguest, shying slightly away at the harsh scowl on Obito’s face. “Hehe… Er…”

Well, he’d meant to bring up the fact he’d befriended Kabuto but with all the commotion and bone-deep exhaustion, he’d kind of forgotten. It shouldn’t be a problem. After all, Obito and Kabuto had worked together during the war, hadn’t they? They’re basically friends already -

“Would you like to explain something to me?” Obito grits out, jaw set. “What is this... _person_ doing here?”

… Or maybe not.

“Oh, uh, Kabuto is my friend now! Right, Kabuto?” he beams at the slightly older nin. He gets a friendly smile in response, the kind of smile that had made him trust Kabuto without a doubt during his chuunin exams. It might be just a mask, but Naruto selfishly likes being smiled at anyways. Maybe someday Kabuto will be able to smile at him for real.

Obito frowns harder, lines of his face twisting. “Yakushi, inside. _Now_.”

Kabuto’s eyes narrow ever so slightly, his smile turns so sweet that you could get cavities just by looking at him for too long, and his stance loosens but he doesn’t move even an inch into the apartment. The hostility is almost tangible. Obito’s lip curls with open disgust in response and his Sharingan spins - Naruto wonders if he doesn’t have good control over his expressions because he’s so used to wearing a mask over his face.

He puts a comforting hand on Kabuto’s arm. “Do you _want_ to come in? I’ll make us all tea. If you want to just go, that’s okay too.”

The spy turns his head towards the hand on his arm, glasses flashing in the light so he can’t quite catch the expression in his eyes, his mouth curling a bit wider at the corners. Obito makes a sharp sound of annoyance as Kabuto takes a step over the threshold and quietly shuts the door behind him.

He ushers Kabuto over to his tiny table and then starts bustling around his kitchen, digging out his tea and the few cups he has that aren’t chipped. Obito remains a scowling figure in the background, crossing his arms and flexing his fingers like he’d rather be throttling the silver haired boy instead of treating him to tea.

Naruto secretly rolls his eyes at the behaviour and then turns to Kabuto while he waits for the water to boil. “Did you need something, Kabuto?”

The milk-and-honey smile is back and the spy looks away from the staring contest he’d apparently been having with Obito. “I was merely checking if you were alright, Naruto-san. The shinobi forces were in quite the upset yesterday after your disappearance. I'm sorry for taking so long to check in on you.”

“Huh? That’s fine! It was just a misunderstanding anyways. Also please just say ‘Naruto’.”

Kabuto dips his head slightly. “Of course, _Naruto-san_ ,” he replies cheerfully. “May I ask what the misunderstanding was? I was under the impression that a certain _unknown_ ninja had abducted you.” The way he says ‘unknown’ seems like a kunai being thrown directly at Obito’s head.

“None of your concern,” Obito snaps.

Kabuto pushes his glasses back up his nose and looks so dreadfully soft and gentle that even Naruto almost forgets the kind of threat he really can be. “If it is Naruto-san’s safety at risk, it very much _is_ my concern.”

“I could say the same to you,” Obito responds, voice crueler and sharper than before. “Why should someone like _you_ be allowed to even stand in the same room as him? A tool used by everyone can be trusted by no one.”

Kabuto’s softness vanishes and leaves behind only the bitterness that Naruto wants to heal.

That’s _it_.

“Kabuto, stay there!” he points at the table. He grabs hold of Obito’s arm and drags him off to his bedroom. “You jerk, come here!”

The door shuts behind them and he wheels on the older man, anger prickling at him like splinters under his nails. He feels the bubbling of Kurama’s chakra automatically coming up to meet his raging emotions. “You had _no_ reason to say that. It was really mean of you.”

“It’s the truth,” Obito hisses, arms wrapping around himself like a shield.

Naruto sets his jaw and grinds his sharpened teeth together. “He just needs a friend, someone to help him figure out who he is.”

“He’s dangerous. He could hurt you.”

After a beat of incredulous silence he laughs outright at the sheer hilarity of that. A man like Obito accusing a man like Kabuto of being _dangerous_? Of hurting him? “ _You’re_ one to talk,” he snickers. “You ever heard of the kettle calling the pot black?”

Obito flinches back just slightly and drops his gaze to the ground, fingers digging into his own arms and looking for all the world like a child hugging himself for comfort once again. Naruto almost feels bad, he _hates_ the thought of making Obito feel this way, but he’s still angry on Kabuto’s behalf.

“Everyone can change. I know that he can be a good person, and I want to help him. You _know_ people can change! _You_ changed.”

“I - … I…” Obito’s brow draws in, head shaking. “How am I supposed to trust your safety around him? I can’t protect you every second of the day. Sooner or later, when he turns on you, I may not be there.”

“I can take care of myself,” he states firmly. “Don’t treat me like some defenseless kid.”

Obito clicks his tongue and paces uneasily back and forth, mouth still curved downwards and eyes still flashing red, glancing back and forth between the ground, Naruto, and the door to the kitchen. What is he supposed to say to convince Obito he’s going to be okay? That Kabuto is alright?

“I was worried too,” he begins slowly. “I thought that if I approached him now, it would already be too late. But it _isn’t_ too late, I’m sure of it. Kurama can sense negative emotions, ya know? Kabuto doesn’t have any hatred in his heart for me.” He shuts his eyes and calls up the brief interaction they’d had once in their previous life, where Kabuto had thanked him for always being himself, for giving him the help he’d needed however distantly and unknowingly that help had been given. “I want to help him become a person I can be proud to be friends with.”

When he reopens his eyes, Obito is watching at him with a gaze that make his heart feel overwhelmed with a heavy emotion at once soft and unyielding.

The thickness in the air makes his tongue trip over itself. “H-He’s had a hard life, Obito. Just… Just let me try. Okay? Just let me _try_ , at least.”

Obito slightly uncurls from his defensive crossed-arm pose and steps closer to him. “I admire that about you… Always wanting to help everyone. Protect everyone.” With every word he opens up more and more, gets closer and closer. “Helping me. Sasuke. Nagato. No matter how we’ve hurt you.”

Naruto frowns at that. “If I didn’t try to understand you, I’d never be able to find the path towards peace. If I understood you and I didn’t try to help you, then I’d be one of the worst people out there. You've all suffered too.”

“Not as much as you.”

“It isn’t a contest.”

“Perhaps not, but none of us have suffered nearly the same way at your hand.”

Naruto doesn’t want to pretend he’s flawless - he knows he’s unintentionally hurt others with his thoughtlessness. All he can hope is that he’s never maliciously harmed another person. “It doesn’t matter who’s hurt who,” he answers finally. “All that matters is that we try to understand one another. We’ve all experienced pain. Only someone else can help fix that pain.”

Obito drops to a knee in front of him, wrapping him into an embrace. Naruto leans into it easily in spite of the heavy topic and the fading embers of anger.

“Kakashi said to me,” Obito whispers into the close space between them, “that holes in the heart are for others to fix. I refused to understand what that meant until you showed me. You’ve fixed those holes in my heart. You saved my life - my soul.”

Naruto is suddenly much more grateful for the hug so he doesn’t have to look Obito in the face. He’s never been good at accepting another person’s thanks. The sincerity burns at his eyes and he wonders for a mortifying second if he’s going to end up crying again.

“If you believe that his heart is worth healing, then I won’t stop you.” The grip around him tightens almost painfully. “If he does hurt you, I will kill him.”

He huffs out a laugh and blinks his eyes to get out the stinging sensation. “I guess that’s the best I’m going to get, huh?”

Obito pulls slightly away and gives him the barest ghost of a smile.

* * *

_Amazing…_

There’s an odd, tight sensation building in his chest as he steps quietly away from the closed bedroom door and sits back down at the table. Technically he had been ordered to stay put, but it had suited him best to get more information about the unknown man - an Uchiha, definitely, and one named Obito at that, how curious. He hadn’t known there were others still left alive beyond Itachi and Sasuke.

A part of him automatically begins drafting a coded letter to inform Orochimaru, then he remembers he’s no longer that man’s servant except in name.

The kettle whistles on the stove and the bedroom door swings open, Naruto-san hurrying out and flashing him a quick smile, the Uchiha following behind, still glowering unhappily at him although much less hostilely than before.

“Sorry, Kabuto,” Naruto-san grins with an edge of embarrassment.

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry for dropping in so unexpectedly.”

The tea is sectioned into cups and the water is carefully poured, then served.

Kabuto needs to speak to the Uchiha alone, which means Naruto-san needs to leave. “Weren’t you actually on the way out when I arrived? I hope I’m not taking up your time.”

Naruto-san jolts and looks at the clock on the wall. “Oh no, I’m late!” He bites his lip, looking between Kabuto and Obito with worry. Clearly he believes the instant he takes eyes off the both of them they’ll end up killing one another, which to be fair, Kabuto isn’t entirely sure that _won’t_ happen. “I mean, it’d be rude to make you leave -”

“No, go on. Your team… They’re waiting for you,” the Uchiha says. “I’ll see _Kabuto_ off.” He says his name like it’s poison, spits it out before it can stick on his tongue.

“Um… I’m not sure...”

Kabuto lets himself soften into the kind, honeyed medic that puts his patients at ease, and curves his mouth into the gentle smile that people seem to trust. “That would be fine with me,” he reassures the doubtful boy. “It’ll be okay.”

Naruto-san looks a tad dazed and smiles back, just as soft and somewhat shy. Kabuto’s first thought is that he wishes he could mimic it. He could get anyone to trust him with a smile like that. His second thought is to wonder how rarely people must reassure him for him to have a reaction like that.

“If you’re sure, I guess.” Naruto-san gives them both a worried look over his shoulder as he leaves to join his team. They listen as his footsteps grow quiet outside of the apartment and the only sound left in the room is the ticking of the clock.

The cup clinks on the counter as Obito sets it down. “What the hell do you want with him, Yakushi?”

Kabuto sees a kindred spirit in him.

“I want him to succeed,” Kabuto swears with a surety he hasn’t felt in himself for a very long time. “He sees me. Not a chameleon, not a mirror reflecting back what he wants to see, not a falsity… I don’t know how, but he knows who I am when I don’t.”

His emotional conditioning and ninja training rails against him admitting such things to anyone, has barely allowed _himself_ to acknowledge these facts, and though the admission burns his throat, the Uchiha nods slowly.

“He sees the truth in a person’s heart, even when it’s buried. Even when you try to bury it. Even if you hurt him.” Obito’s tone is both bitter and loving at once.

Kabuto wonders exactly what this Obito did to hurt Naruto-san so badly to be so amazed that the blonde boy would still try to help him and heal his heart. Kabuto tried to kill him and was still befriended. Some part of him suspects that whatever this Uchiha did to Naruto is somehow worse than simply trying to kill him.

He knew of Uzumaki Naruto prior to their meeting of course. As the Jinchuuriki, he was an interesting piece to keep an eye on despite his buffoonery and general clown behaviour. Clearly he hadn’t been watching closely enough.

But _now_ he’s watching.

He sees the as of yet hidden intelligence. He sees the way Naruto-san looks ahead at a future he can’t quite grasp yet. He sees a long shadow stretching out behind his new master that snakes and danger breed in.

And he sees a kindred spirit in a man who shares the same bleeding wound in his heart that Naruto-san has touched.

And _now_ he knows exactly what a kind person with a healing touch can do - inspire an unbreaking faithfulness in a damaged person. _Now_ , Kabuto thinks smiling at the Uchiha, he knows exactly what he wants to give Naruto-san as a gift, because there is nothing in this world that is better to have than sharp, faithful tools to protect yourself from snakes and danger with.

“Naruto-san can do amazing things with that talent,” Kabuto begins, watching the Uchiha’s reactions closely. “There are many people who need someone like him to heal them.”

Obito narrows his eyes. “What are you suggesting?”

“I know there must be reasons he’s operating secretly,” Kabuto reasons, carefully not asking what those reasons are. If he’s ever found faithful enough, worthy enough, then he’ll be told. “There are dangerous people in the shadows. Remove a certain man from power, and… ‘encourage’, let’s say, his underground faction to obey Naruto-san instead. He’ll be protected.”

Danzou, he doesn’t say. ROOT, he doesn’t say. _Brainwash_ , he certainly doesn't say.

The Uchiha understands him perfectly. His body doesn’t move beyond the barest tensing of his shoulders, but the creases around his eyes and forehead speak volumes: worry. Interest. And red, flashing danger, the bloodiest sort of danger aimed at those who could hurt Naruto-san.

“With eyes like yours, I am quite positive we could turn at least a few towards his cause instead, and the rest can be put down.” He’s learned of the Sharingan in some detail working under Orochimaru. It is more than possible to use it to brainwash someone. Fix a few details here and there, muddy the waters of the mind, and the ROOT nin would be ripe for Naruto-san’s pickings.

Obito shakes his head sharply. “Naruto would never forgive that. To him they aren’t tools to be thrown away.”

 _But to me they are_ , is what Obito also says with his wording. Then they’re in agreement, at least. Kabuto isn’t beyond setting up some pieces for Naruto-san to play with later on. Every leader needs soldiers.

“Then we ensure all of them are obedient before we insert Naruto-san into it.”

Obito narrows his eyes at him and his eyes glow, black tomoe spinning threateningly. “Tell me the truth. What are your intentions with Naruto? Why do you want him in ROOT so badly? What’s my guarantee you aren’t trying to twist this into some sort of gain for your other masters?”

“You and I are the same, aren’t we?” Kabuto comments flippantly. “Can’t you understand what I’m feeling?”

Obito uncrosses his arms. Kabuto feels almost flattered by the vehement outpouring of killing intent. He eases himself into a looser position just in case the Uchiha decides to strike. “We are not the same,” Obito says quietly. “You don’t understand how I feel. What he means to me. You’ve known him for - what? A day? Two? Don’t _ever_ say you know how I feel.”

“You love him?” Kabuto guesses. Obito’s eyes flash and doesn’t say anything. It’s the loudest assent he could give.

“Maybe I don’t know what love feels like anymore, and maybe I have jumped feet first into this, but...” Kabuto recalls that tightness in his chest listening to Naruto-san argue in defense of his life, wanting to help him, be his friend. “It’s been a long time since I’ve known who I am. Naruto-san can see me. That is enough for me to want to fight for him. As long as he can see me, I feel as though I’m human again. I’m alive. It isn’t that I would never betray him, it’s that I _cannot_. My ‘other masters’ created a ghost and asked me to find purpose in life serving under them. With Naruto-san, he does not want me to be a ghost. I am myself in his eyes.”

“And? What are you? Who is ‘Kabuto’?”

Kabuto slips his glasses off and thumbs over the circular frames. Nonou loved him. He knows she did. And he loved her back, enough to throw himself at the dogs to keep her dream afloat. When she didn’t recognize him, when she lay there dying, looking up at him, and she didn’t know who he was… It had shattered him. His ‘self’ became nothing but a shadow.

_Footsteps behind him, not hiding themselves and clearly headed towards him. He relaxes his palms and puts a calm smile on his face. If he’s miscalculated, no need to let whoever it is know that this lowly genin is more than he appears._

_“Kabuto!”_

_He stops. That’s a voice he knows, but not a voice who should know him. He turns, wearing a curious mask. “Yes?”_

_A boy wearing all orange is in the alley behind him, standing just under a light post. The light washes out his hair and his clothing into dull mockeries, and it catches on something in his hand. A kunai. He looks closer. A bloodied kunai. The dark patches on the boy’s pants aren’t shadows, they’re blood._

_“I’m sorry, who are you?”_

_The Uzumaki child stares at him with a determined expression and then sharply holds his fist out, the one holding the kunai. It’s not a throwing position, or even one well suited to combat at all, rather it’s like he’s showing it off, but Kabuto flexes his hands and prepares himself anyways._

_“My name is Uzumaki Naruto, but you knew that,” the boy responds quietly. “And I know who you are, Kabuto.”_

_That could mean anything. But it’s so close to meaning_ something _, something quite dangerous for Kabuto’s health. “Oh, have we met before?” he wonders aloud, putting a hand to his chin. Then he forces himself to look concerned. “By the way, are you hurt? I’m a medic, you know. Let me help!”_

_He jogs lightly forward with his eyes trained on the kunai and his hands glowing green. One step away, he looks back up and finds himself caught by the look in Uzumaki’s eyes. Something about it reminds him of ---_

_His hands stop glowing and he stops himself just in front of the boy._

_“If you kill me, it’ll probably be bad for you,” Uzumaki says, mouthing quirking upwards._

_“...” Kabuto adjusts his glasses and recentres himself. “What are you talking about? Why would I attack a fellow Konoha shinobi?"_

_Uzumaki takes a deep breath. “Don’t try killing me until I’m done talking, okay? And don’t worry. There’s no one around right now.”_

_How interesting. He puts on a mildly amused face, mixing in some annoyance as he throws a look over his shoulder. He can’t sense anyone either, but that doesn’t mean there’s no one there. In a put-upon voice, he sighs, “Oh, I suppose I could spare some time.”_

_“I know about Nonou -”_

_Kabuto grabs him by the throat. Instead of panicking or trying to attack, Uzumaki holds the blade clenched in his first closer to himself and stares up at him fearlessly. “Are you working with Danzou-sama?” he asks in a soft voice. With just the slightest pressure, just the slightest application of chakra, he could split the boy’s throat open and leave him for dead. Many people in Konoha hate the Jinchuuriki child. He could frame a dozen different people off the top of his head._

_“No,” Uzumaki forces through the pressure on his throat._

_“Show me your tongue.”_

_The boy opens his mouth wide. There isn’t a sign of the blocky ink tattoo silencing ROOT agents. He silently disrupts his and then the boy’s chakra. No henge or other genjutsu reveals itself._

_No agent of Orochimaru-sama’s would approach him this way, and definitely not without him knowing prior._

_“What do you want?” Kabuto asks, still smiling blandly. He’s always found that people find smiles to be unsettling during interrogation and torture. It’s somewhat of his specialty._

_Bemusingly enough, the boy smiles back. “I want to talk to you.” Kabuto flexes his fingers and imagines the mess he’d make if he really did split the boy’s throat open. He feels the muscles move as Uzumaki swallows, and the vibrations as he speaks. “I wanted to make sure you were okay, and ask you... if you wanted to be my friend.”_

_Kabuto picks over those two sentences a few times in his head, trying to find a cipher or clue to clear the foggy mystery of what exactly_ that _means._

_“So, um… Would you like to? Be my friend, I mean?”_

_He feels almost stunned. There is no cipher, only the words of an idiot who knows things he should not. A spark of something hot and angry alights in his chest. “How do you know about Nonou?”_

_“I know about a lot of things I shouldn’t. I know your glasses used to be hers.” The Uzumaki boy traces the outside edges of them with his eyes and his face softens. “You’ve taken such good care of them. I’m sure she’s watching you proudly from the Pure Land.”_

_Kabuto clenches his hand and feels satisfied when the boy chokes. “How. Do you know. About Nonou?”_

_“I-I saw -- it in a dream,” Uzumaki struggles to say._

_The worst part of all is how it doesn’t even sound like a lie. “A dream,” he repeats, unimpressed, but he obligingly loosens his grip again. “What dream?”_

_“A dream - your dream. About Nonou. A dream where Danzou never took you away to ROOT.” Uzumaki looks down at his hand curled around the grip of his kunai. “She didn’t know it was you when she died because Danzou tricked her. Right? And… that hurt a lot, didn’t it?”_

_Kabuto doesn’t say anything but he takes a step back and drops his hand. So he knows about that too?_

_“I… want to help you,” Uzumaki says. “I want to help you find yourself again. I want to be your friend and help you!” The boy looks back up at him, eyes blazing even in the pale light. Kabuto feels stuck, like a butterfly pinned to a board. “I don’t want you to be alone! All I want is for you to find yourself again.”_

_Find himself? Kabuto almost wants to laugh. The Iwa nin? The Kumo nin? Kiri? Suna? The spy who’s loyal to Danzou, or Orochimaru, or Sasori? Which ‘self’ is he talking about?_

_“I know who you are,” Uzumaki says confidently and holds the kunai out to him. “This is what reminded me of you.”_

_Kabuto looks at the offered kunai. It’s edges dulled and nearly blunt, rust crawling over it, wrappings torn, and both fresh and old blood staining it._

_“Someone… put a lot of love and care into making you. And then… you were bought by someone who didn’t appreciate you. And then you kept getting used and used until you were covered in blood until it was almost impossible to recognize you, and then you were thrown away. But I recognize you. You’re the one Nonou loved. The one everyone at the orphanage loved! You’re Yakushi Kabuto!”_

_This doesn’t make any sense. This boy shouldn’t know anything about Nonou, or himself._

_“You don’t have to keep getting used and thrown away.” Uzumaki cradles the kunai in both hands. “Please let me help you. Let’s be friends.”_

_“... You know who I work for?” Kabuto queries, struggling more than usual to keep his voice light and friendly. That’s right, light and friendly, keep himself open, allow people to think they know what he is and then drip dry them for information before they realize what’s happening. The deadliest trap was always lain when people couldn’t see it coming._

_“Yeah,” the boy sighs. “I kinda really don’t like that guy. Experimenting on babies? It’s just too sad.”_

_So he knows. This boy won’t be leaving here alive._

_“What will you do if I refuse your friendship?”_

_Uzumaki slants his mouth and shrugs half-heartedly. “I’d be disappointed I guess. But if you choose Snake Face, then at least… I don’t know. Maybe it would be something you chose for once. Maybe he can help you find yourself. I don’t think so though…”_

_“He also suggested that I find a path for myself under him,” Kabuto reveals carelessly. Uzumaki won’t survive the night. Might as well continue the conversation until everything useful is uncovered. “Why should I change my allegiance to someone weak like you?”_

_“I don’t want you to be under me,” Uzumaki frowns. “I want you to be able to stand next to me as Kabuto. My friend.” And then he mutters something about not being weak under his breath._

_Stand next to him as Kabuto? The childish self of his from so long ago? As if. That Kabuto died with Nonou. He shoots his hand out and taps the boy’s throat, backing away before the blood can spray all over him. Uzumaki looks at him with surprise, one hand going to grab at the gushing wound._

_“Goodbye, Uzumaki Naruto.”_

_Heat rushes over him, warming him to point of scalding and he watches a red film coat the boy’s skin and the skin of his throat knit up. His eyes go red and the whisker marks on his face darken and thicken._

_“You’re... supposed to say… ‘hello’, Kabuto.”_

_So, the Kyuubi is awake inside of him? Kabuto snaps forward and taps a few areas - each upper arm, upper thighs, and just over his heart - cutting deep inside with his scalpels. Surely that must be enough. He cut the_ heart _for goodness' sake. He’ll dress the body afterwards and cover up any medical techniques._

_The boy staggers and the heat increases, turning the light shining over them red. “I won’t stop… You’re my friend!”_

_“Hah!” Kabuto barks out a surprised laugh. “Weren’t you trying to get me to_ be _your friend? Isn’t this a little unreasonable of you? Don’t I get a say?”_

 _Before the boy can say anymore inane, useless things he attacks viciously, using his scalpels and cutting, cutting, cutting all over. Every tendon, every major nerve, every major artery - the blood soaks the alley way and Kabuto finds himself bathing in it, but the boy still stands upright, holding his kunai and watching him with those_ eyes _, so very kind, just like Nonou's --_

_He stops attacking._

_A mouthful of blood is spat on the ground and the red haze dissipates. “I can feel it. Inside you. You’re so angry, and lonely, and hurt. And I know… I know that feeling. I used to hate this world too. If Iruka-sensei stopped recognizing me… Stopped loving me… I’d probably want to burn everything down. I don’t know if I could keep going…”_

_Kabuto takes an unsteady step back when Uzumaki looks at him with teary eyes._

_“That’s why I want to help you so badly. I know the person Nonou loved must have been a very special person… I want to know him. I want to be that person’s friend.”_

_“He’s dead,” Kabuto denies._

_“He isn’t. He’s right here in front of me, wearing Nonou’s glasses because he loves her!”_

_“I don’t even know who I am!” Kabuto shouts, feeling pained by the admission. “Who is the person Nonou loved?! A no-name orphan! A weak child who killed her!”_

_“I would never blame a child for something like that,” Uzumaki replies heatedly. “I would never - because it was Danzou who made that happen. He set it up that way. He turned you against one another to get rid of tools he no longer wanted!”_

_Kabuto’s eyes flash down to the kunai still gripped in the boy’s hand. A tool, cared for, sold, thrown away. He imagines himself being moulded by Nonou’s gentle touch and loving eyes. Danzou’s harsh grip. Orochimaru’s path of blood. And now a boy who knows things he shouldn’t, finding that blade that was thrown aside and picking it up, holding it with care._

_“And… It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember who you are right now. Because I’ll help you. I won’t leave you behind in the darkness. I’ll stay at your side until you can become the Kabuto Nonou loved again. That's a promise."_

_Kabuto licks his lips and tastes blood. Everything is so red. "I just tried killing you. And you'll still call me your friend?"_

_Naruto - is he Naruto now? - laughs a bit. "You wouldn't be the first friend of mine who's tried killing me. I'm made of sturdy stuff, so it's okay. Um. I'd rather you not do it again though."_

_Kabuto takes a step into the blood pooling at their feet and holds his hand out. Naruto-kun - no that's not quite right either, too familiar - passes him the kunai. It's well balanced, a chip here or there indicating its use. It can still kill. It can still be used. It only needs to be in the hands of a proper master who can recognize the best way to use it._

_Naruto-san - that’s good enough for now - wants him to become the boy he was with Nonou but he doesn't know how. What he does know is this: that Naruto-san knows who he is, and secondly, Kabuto knows that what he’s best at is being a tool. Something made with loving hands and used to kill._

_Naruto-san reminds him of Nonou in the way that he doesn’t want him to be a tool, but that’s all he is and all he can imagine being. Metal turned into a blade can be melted down into slag and reformed into something else, but he doesn’t want to change his form again. He may never find his way back if he is completely reshaped once again._

_Perhaps, just as loving hands can lead to a tool's creation, a tool in the hands of a loving person can remember what it was before while remaining sharp. Maybe he can remember the Kabuto that Nonou loved, maybe he can find a way of walking both paths without losing himself._

_"Kabuto?"_

_Kabuto straightens and feels his heart thud painfully in his chest. "I'd… like to be your friend, I think."_

_Naruto-san beams at him through blood, and throws his arms around him in a hug. His mind tells him to use the careless embrace to kill the boy once and for all, as surely_ something _must be able to kill him, but something stays his hand. He obligingly returns the embrace, feels the pounding of his heart in his ears._

_Kabuto stays all night, carefully cleaning up blood so there’s no trace left behind, thinking about the new path he’s taken his first step on, and he feels… satisfied._

He puts his glasses back on and reaches into his kunai pouch and pulls out the rusted, overused blade that Naruto-san had given him. “This is a gift that he gave me. He said that it reminded him of me. That I was made with loving care. That I was used by people who didn’t appreciate me. I cannot return to who I was before all of this. I don’t know if I even want to… I want to stay as this blade. A blade that will cut down his enemies.

“I recognize that he is walking down a dangerous path. The more blades he has to protect him, the safer he’ll be. All he needs is to become the heart of the roots in Konoha’s tree and he’ll never be alone.”

The Uchiha smiles grimly. “You’re going to be his tool? You think he’ll ever accept that?”

“‘If I didn’t try to understand you, I’d never be able to find the path towards peace’,” Kabuto quotes. Obito’s killing intent increases as he realizes that Kabuto had been eavesdropping. Kabuto envisions the man taking the kunai in his hand and shoving it into his throat but he pushes the vision away. “He’s the one who saw me. Doesn’t that mean he can also understand me? And don’t pretend you don’t also consider yourself a tool for his success. Surely, he’ll see why I need to be this way. I’ve made my decision. Whether you assist me or not, I’ll gather those roots and make a shield of blades for him.”

“... Fine.” Kabuto resists the urge to grin triumphantly. “But you follow my orders for now.”

They’ll see about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kabuto is a weird one. He can be very cruel, in canon he talks down to basically everyone but Orochimaru, but also deeply hurt by what happened with Nonou! In my defense 1) Naruto can talk nearly anyone around 2) Kabuto has been separated from Orochimaru extensively for theoretical years while he acts as a mole in Konoha and thusly is more susceptible to Naruto's talking abilities 3) I just like Kabuto, okay.
> 
> Anyways this is why Naru needed some new clothes :3
> 
> Next time we shall see how Kakashi reacts to his student and what Kabuto and Obito do about Danzou!


	5. The root of all things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Obito and Kabuto sets things in motion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait!! Here is the new chapter, hopefully it lives up to expectations. Thank you for your patience and your comments! They truly feed me. Enjoy!

Naruto feels a sense of foreboding as he runs down the street towards the other side of the village where the training grounds lay. Obito alone could get up to trouble, but mixing in Kabuto? All he can hope for is that they don't actually end up killing one another.

He sticks to the alleys and side streets, skin crawling as the ANBU follow him.

Hopefully Obito’s genjutsu is good enough to have kept them from hearing their conversation, especially the part with Kabuto. Danzou and Orochimaru share information, and Danzou has ROOT plants inside of the official ANBU. All it takes is one plant to have noticed Kabuto. The silver haired medic is in a dicey position now if he’s telling the truth about wanting to be his friend. Naruto doubts somehow that Kabuto could get away from Orochimaru as easily as Anko did.

That’s out of his hands for now, though.

He arrives at the bridge and listens to Sakura’s lecture on timeliness despite the fact Kakashi is always hours and late and isn’t to be seen -

Wait.

Kakashi drops out of the trees with his book already in his hands.

Naruto quickly mentally checks the time - he’s only an hour late after everything with Obito and Kabuto. What the hell is Kakashi doing here before him? He should still have at least two or three hours before Kakashi gets here!

“Well? What’s your excuse?” Sakura presses him, hands on her hips.

His mind flops around like a fish out of water. Kakashi? Earlier than him? Did the door Kaguya made actually take him to an alternate dimension and he just hadn’t noticed until now? Sakura leans forward menacingly and he splutters, “Ah - er - I -”

Kakashi stares at the page of the book in his hand, but his eye doesn’t move and he doesn’t flip the pages. He feels the pressure of the Copy-nin’s attention focused on him like a spotlight and he sweats lightly under it.

“I - uh, slept in?” he lies, voice tilting questioningly. “Th-they kept me pretty late last night.”

“Who kept you?” Sakura asks with suspicion in her tone.

He points a finger at Kakashi. “Him and Hokage-jiji.”

“Naruto,” Kakashi interrupts casually before Sakura can say anything else although she looks very much like she has more to say. “Are those the same clothes you wore yesterday?”

He looks down at himself, checking for why he’s asking, wondering if he’d somehow ripped or stained the pants Ino’d picked out for him without noticing. “Why?”

“Just answer,” Kakashi orders sharply.

Ino had gotten him a few sets of the clothing she’d picked out for him, casually throwing it onto her clan’s tab that she has access to thanks to being the heir. She’d brushed it off, and he knows she probably did it because she feels bad for him, but he had still almost cried in the middle of the store.

Most shinobi wear the same outfit anyways, whether that be a uniform or their custom shinobi clothing, for ease of recognition between allies - especially in a city like Konoha who have a large population with dark hair, differentiating between enemies and allies during a battle can be a split second decision.

All that to say - he _had_ worn his second set of clothing today, not the ones he’d had on yesterday. The sensation of being about to step on an explosive note pops up again.

“ _Say yes._ ”

“Yes,” he obeys Kurama without thinking.

Kakashi still looks irritable at that, but his attention goes back to his book. “Wash them tonight. Now, I have an exercise for us to try.”

" _You smell like the Uchiha,_ " Kurama helpfully explains and Naruto hits himself for not thinking about that beforehand. Of course he smells like Obito. He'll have to think of a way to prevent the man's smell from leaching onto him.

Ignoring that problem for now, Naruto watches in shock as Kakashi turns and walks up the side of a tree, explaining what tree walking is and how you can achieve it with chakra. He tells them to take out a kunai to mark their progress on the tree and backs away to let them have at it.

Naruto stands back to watch his teammates - Sasuke runs at the tree after focusing and manages a few steps up before slashing at the bark and leaping back down. Sakura walks up the tree until she hits the top where the branches thin out and she cheers.

“This is pretty easy!”

“Alright Naruto, go ahead,” Kakashi motions.

Breath in. Focus his chakra. Breath out. He’s done this a thousand times - maybe a hundred thousand times. Tree walking is second nature to him. It’s a little trickier walking on a living thing, even if it is as simple as a tree. It’s chakra system changes and swells depending on the growth of the tree - once you master walking on something like that, walking on walls becomes infinitely easier. He supposes that’s why they usually teach it this way around.

He puts a steady foot on the tree, one after another, and reaches the top branches. His neck burns with the feeling of Sasuke’s stare weighing on him.

He walks back down with his eyes firmly trained at his feet and keeps his mouth shut.

“No way,” he hears Sakura mutter. “How did he get it and not Sasuke-kun…?”

Kakashi appraises him before nodding. “Sakura, Naruto, since you don’t seem to need any practice, do some sparring. I'll watch over you two for now. Sasuke, just keep at it.”

“Sensei,” he begins cautiously, but stops himself before he asks why the hell they’re doing tree-walking now instead of a month from now in Wave. Kakashi turns a deceptively lazy look to him. “Um… When are we doing more missions?” he asks instead.

“... Not now.”

And that’s that.

Sakura gets into the Academy form across from him which he copies and they leap at one another, dodging and striking to the tune of Sasuke’s feet thumping back onto the ground and his kunai slashing at bark.

* * *

His right eye aches. He reaches up to touch the right side of his face that he has kept bandaged and protected for many long years and finds his right arm won’t answer him. With some struggle, he lifts his head and looks at his side with his good eye and finds his right arm gone, stump leaking out whitish fluid.

What the hell happened?

His left hand comes up to his face instead and prods around. The bandages are torn. His fingers come away bloodied. The eye is gone.

“Fuu,” he calls out, throat dry.

Fuu doesn’t answer, and none of the rest of his guard come to his aid. Has he been betrayed?

He tries to lift himself up from the ground, head pounding and body listing to the side when he forgets to compensate for his missing right arm. What happened?

On his traditional low table are the reports he was looking over, now speckled with blood. That’s right - he’d been sitting there, sipping his tea, reading through the written reports from the team he had sent to Mizu to investigate the rebellion mounting there. It wouldn’t do to allow some ruffian upstart to get into office and start making a mess of things with Konoha. It suits him better to have a despot killing off the bloodlines in Kiri.

So he’d read a report, taken a sip of tea, then - a change in the air, a figure swirling and warping, and a morphing sharingan locking onto his good eye. 

What a fool he is. What an idiot. Looking an Uchiha in the eye was as good as death itself.

And yet he’s not dead.

“- see with it?” he hears through the rushing of blood in his head. He turns towards the voice, over his shoulder, and sees the silver haired rat he’d agreed to give over to Orochimaru years back after failing to kill him, his hands hovering with a green glow over the face of his attacker.

“Strictly speaking, yes, I can probably connect the ocular nerve and make it so you can see through it, but it isn’t the correct side. It most likely won’t function exactly right. It may develop amblyopia, or -”

“Can the doujutsu in it be used or not?”

“I wouldn’t know. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the opportunity to experiment on Uchiha eyes. I suppose we’ll just have to find out.”

Danzou feels a cut of fear and fury strike through him with the sharpness of a well-honed blade. This is no random attack. They clearly came here with the intention of getting his eye - Uchiha Shisui’s eye. Do they know the power it contains? They must. After all, the scarred man under the silver haired spy’s hands is an Uchiha too.

The unknown man grunts in annoyance. “As long as it works.”

“I’m sure it will,” the rat says agreeably. “By the way, Danzou-sama, good afternoon. Rest well?”

Danzou keeps his eye trained on Yakushi. He won’t get caught in the Uchiha’s gaze again, especially not now that he has _that_ eye. “Is this revenge?” he asks. “I hadn’t thought you to be so rash. So naive.”

Yakushi laughs blandly. “No, not revenge at all. If it were revenge, I assure you that you would not have woken up.”

Even without an eye, without his arm, he is still a dangerous man. He’ll make them regret allowing him to wake up. Despite everything, he was still the subordinate of the honourable Nidaime Hokage. He takes a deep breath, and with a single hand seal, he breathes out a gust wide and hard enough to blast a hole through the side of his traditional home.

Yakushi dodges backwards and out of the way, but the man on the ground simply stays put and not even a single hair on his head is moved out of place.

“Please refrain from doing that,” Yakushi comments mildly, stepping through the debris back to the Uchiha’s side, smiling sweetly. “You’re disrupting the operation.”

He feels the cut of fear and fury strike through him again with more force. This is a dangerous situation, one he can’t be sure to win with his injuries and the unknown abilities of the enemy. He staggers to his feet and slams the sliding door to his left open. In the hallway are the bodies of Fuu and the other agents he had patrolling and he presumes them all to be dead, but after a moment he sees their chests rise and fall.

“Hurry up,” the Uchiha orders behind him.

“Yes, yes…”

There isn’t enough time to rouse them. He steps over their bodies and flees into his garden, swaying uneasily. He must make it to ROOT headquarters, or if he cannot… His left hand touches his chest, and he grimly accepts the reality that he may die today to protect Konoha and her interests. He cannot allow that eye to be used by someone else. Even if all else fails and he can’t escape, the Reverse Four Symbols seal on his chest will ensure that the two men who attacked him will die with him.

That is the least he can do.

Footsteps on the deck behind him - he won’t look. He can’t be caught. He won’t let that eye be used against him ---

He stops running and feels something in his mind twist and shift. Something rings deafeningly, over and over and over again, carving a pathway through his thoughts. He feels his memories shift, some things blurring, some things sharpening, some things being created and forcing themselves into gaps that didn’t exist before. And there is nothing he can do to stop it.

After a few minutes, the ringing stops. He straightens and feels his pulse return to normal. He turns. Behind him are two of the Uzumaki boy’s allies. The Uchiha is cradling the left side of his head.

“Well?” Yakushi asks, looking amused.

Danzou frowns at them both and his head aches terribly before he remembers that they’re… allies. That’s right. They’re protecting the Jinchuuriki. All three of them are working to protect that child. It’s only natural - he’s the Jinchuuriki, and the son of the Yondaime, and although Danzou never approved of his appointment to the position, even he could recognize the Yellow Flash’s strength. His son would be sure to inherit that power. Of course Danzou needs to protect him, for the betterment of the village.

He takes a step towards his home and stumbles a bit when he feels his missing arm. He can’t quite remember why it’s gone. His right eye socket is bleeding too, for a reason he cannot fathom. His brain feels scrambled, as though someone had stuck a kunai through his eye and stirred up the gray matter with the blade.

Through the mess, he remembers that he had chosen to recall Yakushi Kabuto from Orochimaru, put him at the Uzumaki child’s side because…

Because he’d chosen Uzumaki Naruto as his successor.

The roots of the tree need to be tended to. Uzumaki has a soft hand, just like his father, but what better way to raise the child properly, show him what the shinobi world is truly like, than to give him ROOT and teach him how to use it?

Danzou won’t be around forever. He’s planted the seed that will grow into a strong tree. Someday that child will be the Hokage and with Danzou’s influence, he shall be a Hokage like the Nidaime - shrewd, firm-handed and hard-hearted. Nothing like Hiruzen.

In the hallways of his home, ROOT agents lay still and motionless besides their slow breathing. Weapons are discarded and he can hear down the hall the buzzing of Torune’s kikaichuu.

“When they wake up, they will tell you we are your enemy, but we aren’t,” the Uchiha tells him and a distant ringing sounds in his head for a moment. “You know that.”

Of course he knows who they are. They aren’t friends, certainly, but allies at least. He looks down at Fuu’s sleeping form. None of them are particularly injured, but there’s a hole blown through the side of his home and weapons scattered around. “What happened?”

“You did not inform them of our meeting today. We handled them.”

As if he would forget something like that, make a green soldier’s mistake like that. But then the world wavers, and he _remembers_ forgetting, somehow. “I see…” he concedes distastefully. “My mistake. I was busy with the reports from Kiri.”

He sits down at his upturned table and orders Yakushi to dress his mysterious wounds. As the spy moves to bandage him, he notices the Uchiha mask himself, left eye bleeding.

Uchiha with bleeding eyes never boded well. He’d know, after teaming with Kagami for so long.

“Tonight, I will formally pass my duties on to Uzumaki Naruto,” Danzou announces as Yakushi carefully cleans and wraps his right eye. The spy’s face quirks into a surprised smile. “It has been long enough. Ensure he arrives tonight and is not observed.”

“Yes, Danzou-sama,” Yakushi bows his head.

* * *

Obito leaves Yakushi to it, slipping into Kamui and following the call of his other eye, towards Kakashi. He focuses on the feeling and sees darkness through his gifted eye. It irritates him somewhat that Kakashi has it covered so often. He’d promised to let Obito see the future through it, and yet all he uses it for is killing.

Is that the life Kakashi promised to show him? A life full of nothing but death?

He phases back into the world just far enough out that Kakashi shouldn’t be able to sense or smell him. Thankfully he’s not a sensor type, otherwise Obito would have more trouble avoiding him. As it is, he’d barely slipped away in the forest when Kakashi had finally caught up with them.

The left side of his head hurts as the twice-stolen eye throbs from it’s usage. It had been a shameful loss when Danzou had killed himself and destroyed the eye the first time around after his fight with Sasuke. Shisui had been a friendly face to Obito during his childhood years, and among one of the only Uchiha to have an outgoing disposition like his. To think that brat had a power like this… He hadn’t even needed to make eye contact.

It would’ve made keeping Yagura in control a lot easier if he’d known about it before.

To the best of his knowledge, Danzou used it fairly infrequently and even Itachi had stated that it could only be used once in ten years. And yet… He can feel the eye’s power awakening within him. He had pushed it to the very extent of its ability, implanting and rewriting Danzou’s memories until he felt close to collapsing from the pain, and the eye had gone quiet. If that was the only use he could get from it, then that was enough.

But it’s not. The eye’s power is gathering up again. It might only be a few hours, or at most a day before it can be used again.

Is it because of his Uchiha blood? Itachi never implanted it into himself, perhaps that is why it could only be used so sparingly. Or is it because of Hashirama’s cells? Danzou had access to those as well, and they might be the reason why Danzou was able to use it at will.

He keeps the left eye shut as he moves in just a bit closer to get an eye on the clearing where Team 7 is training.

Sasuke is running at a tree with a kunai in hand, struggling to stay on it and slashing at it when he inevitably falls away. Away from him, Naruto and Sakura go through kata together under Kakashi’s supervision before sparring lightly. Just beyond them, in the trees, is the team of ANBU guarding Naruto.

Maybe once the eye has recovered he can ‘adjust’ the Sandaime’s opinion on the need of the ANBU team. They’re nothing but a nuisance.

He settles back and watches Naruto carefully block Sakura’s hit, a punch that once would’ve cracked stone but instead is limply rebuffed. Her attention isn’t on the spar at all. Her eyes flicker over to Sasuke more often than not, allowing openings that would leave her dead in an actual combat scenario.

Obito relaxes into the shade and waits as the sun passes over them, watching until they’re dismissed. Sasuke looks frustrated and angry, storming away when Sakura tries to speak to him. Kakashi shadows Naruto all the way home before finally spiriting away, allowing Obito the space to go back into the apartment. He’s not concerned greatly with the ANBU - none of them were skilled enough to notice his genjutsu the first night, and none of them notice him now.

“Welcome home,” he greets, pulling his mask off his face.

Naruto jumps a little, startled. “D-Don’t scare me like that!” Then he rubs the back of his head, lips curling into a shy smile. “Hehe… You said welcome home.” Naruto bounds up to him and hugs him around the waist tightly. “I’m home...”

Obito feels his heart warm with affection, surging up through him like an overwhelming tidal wave. He wants to scoop Naruto up and curl around him in bed again but the door clicks open quietly and Kabuto slips inside.

“Shall we?” Kabuto invites.

“Shall we what?” Naruto asks curiously.

Obito intervenes before Kabuto can speak. “We have somewhere we need to go.” He’s already debated whether it would be wiser to clue Naruto in or not and come to the conclusion that the quicker they can pull this off the more likely it would be that Naruto would go along with it. Giving him the chance to think about it and refuse would cause more damage than good.

Naruto hums and looks confused. “Okay, I guess…”

Obito lays a hand on his shoulder and snaps out a hand to grab Yakushi's arm. His Kamui works best with physical contact. With the two of them in tow, he pulls them into his dimension, ignoring the spy's brief attempt at struggling free, and deposits them outside in an alley far enough away to not he seen by the ANBU guards.

Kabuto wrenches his arm away and shakes the dizziness off. "... Well then." He adjusts his glasses and spins on his heel. "Follow me."

Kabuto leads them through the streets winding through the village until he comes across a specific storm drain that he goes down into. They descend into darkness and Obito doesn’t take a hand off of Naruto the entire while. He’s worked with Kabuto before - he’s a dangerous man to take lightly.

“Why exactly are we down here?” Naruto asks, head swiveling in curiosity. “And what is this place anyways?”

On cue, a masked duo appears before them. "Stop where you are," one of them orders in a clipped tone, one hand reaching back to their tanto. Their partner rests their hands loosely into the ram position.

Kabuto smiles patiently and waves his hands non-threateningly. "Now, now. We're here on Danzou-sama's request, surely you were told."

The one who spoke, with a mask resembling a mouse, turns their head ever so slightly and makes eye contact with their partner, a crane. After a moment of silent discussion, the crane lets their hands fall to their sides.

"Follow me."

"... Is this ROOT?" Naruto whispers incredulously.

Kabuto hums in affirmation. "This is it. The underbelly of Konoha."

They follow Crane further into the underground facility until they come into the main area full of criss crossing stone pathways that link up in the vast space, each pathway carving itself under Konoha proper. Truly, this is a place worthy of the name ROOT.

After a minute or so of following one of the paths, they come finally to a door and Crane kneels before it.

"Danzou-sama."

Obito, still holding onto Naruto's shoulder, feels the tension coiling in the muscle. "Stay calm," he murmurs. Naruto looks up at him and frowns but nods.

Crane listens to the response through the door and stands, motioning them to go through it. Naruto nearly resists, looking as though he'd prefer to be anywhere else, but follows with some urging from the two of them.

Danzou is waiting inside the room, an office of sorts, and Fuu and Torune stand at his back. There is a desk and a shelf, both stacked and stuffed with files and books and scrolls. Every last scrap of information one would need to keep a secret organization up and running.

"So you're here," Danzou says almost dismissively, eye singling out Naruto. "Let us get this over with. Stand here and I will key the seals on their tongues and on this room to you."

"The seals on their tongues?" Naruto repeats in confusion. "Why would you do that?"

Danzou seems to restrain himself from sighing. "Starting from tonight, I will be 'retired', so to speak, and you must have all the tools at hand in order to continue to grow the roots of Konoha. The time is now. So come stand here and quit gawking."

Fuu and Torune share a look, and Kabuto's hand strays an inch closer to his kunai pouch.

"Me - in charge of ROOT? Is this some kind of messed up joke or something, dattebayo?" Naruto demands heatedly.

Kabuto sends Obito a sharp glare. Yes, yes, he knew that Naruto would not take this lying down but it would have been worse trying to convince him beforehand. Naruto would surely have found some way of tricking his way out of the whole situation given some preparation time, and Obito can't allow this opportunity to slip through their fingers.

Danzou scowls. "You knew this time was coming. Did Yakushi not inform you of what tonight would hold?"

Naruto jerks his shoulder out of Obito's grip and backs away, giving them both a betrayed look.

* * *

Hinata quirks her head and quietly wanders into the street Naruto-kun had gone down. She’d watched him stealing his way surreptitiously with a tall man in black and a young man with silver hair, straight from his apartment to here. For what must be the first time, she’s thankful for her wallflower attitude that lets her slip under people’s notice.

When her team had finished their D-rank missions, she’d decided to take a moment to check in on one of her favourite people in the world - Naruto. The sunny, beaming boy who’d defended her once upon a time in their youth and who’d never given up, no matter what. He’s her idol.

She’d seen him returning from training, heading up to his apartment, and when she’d activated her byakugan she’d seen something… strange.

A person _manifesting_ inside and holding Naruto-kun - not using shunshin, not repressing their signature, but rather appearing like magic. On top of that, multiple presences hovering around outside that had followed Naruto-kun home. And worse, someone sneaking up to the apartment without alerting the people outside.

She’d never noticed anything like that before around Naruto’s apartment. And they were all of decent strength, probably at _least_ jounin or chuunin in rank according to the maturity of their chakra systems. She’d waited in the street nearby, and the people outside the apartment hadn’t moved an inch during her observation.

Then, Naruto and the two unknown presences had… vanished. Her eyes had almost hurt from the sudden lack of brightness coming from them. By pure luck she’d noticed Naruto’s chakra system reappearing nearby and she’d rushed after them.

Only yesterday her clan had been sent into a brief upset when the Hokage had demanded that available shinobi be sent to him to find a target inside of Konoha. No one had told her anything, not being the green genin she is, but she’s good at being unnoticed. She blends into the wall and people overlook her. She hears things she shouldn’t.

They’d been looking for Naruto.

Sometimes if Hokage-sama needs something or someone found _now_ , although usually outside of Konoha, he’ll make immediate personnel requests from the tracker clans - the Hyuuga, Inuzuka, and Aburame.

Naruto had gone missing and people from her clan had been short-list recruited to find him. Now, he has multiple high-level chakra signatures waiting on standby near his apartment, with unknown people meeting with him secretly, disappearing and reappearing like magic, and now they’re all heading down into the sewers.

It all feels very wrong.

She peers down at the sewer grate, innocuous in the evening light. Her Byakugan stretches and stretches as far as it can go, peeling away layers of dirt and stone. There are some people down there, at the outer edges of her sight, glittering in the dark like little gems. But she can’t spy Naruto’s specific signature.

She waits as long as she dares, until the sun begins setting and she knows if she doesn’t return home then her father will punish her. She activates her Byakugan once more, but she still doesn’t see Naruto.

Before training in the morning, she’ll go double-check at his apartment and see if he’s there. If he is, then maybe she’s just overreacting. If he’s not then...

Hinata feels her stomach turn with worry but she returns home with her head bowed.

* * *

Naruto looks horrified. “W-What the hell are you all talking about?”

Danzou frowns at his reluctance, brow creasing and a sharp glint entering his eye. “This is what you’ve been trained for, child. Now accept the burden of becoming a true shinobi.”

“I haven’t _trained_ for anything like this!” Naruto retorts, face turning a bit red with anger as he stares at Obito and Yakushi.

Something in Danzou’s face changes and Obito finally realizes Kotoamatsukami’s weakness - the victim must believe the lie. Danzou has had no reason to question it until now. He was told Naruto was his pupil and that he was to cede power over ROOT to him immediately, and who was there to correct him? Not any ROOT agent, certainly. Not Kabuto, not Obito.

But Naruto is fighting the reality Obito crafted. It’s only a matter of time until the genjutsu unravels.

And not to mention Fuu and Torune. The Yamanaka stares at Danzou's back and quickly forms a seal to disrupt his chakra, looking confused when no genjutsu reveals itself.

Kabuto steps backwards quickly and smiles easily. "Torune-san… If you have your kikaichuu approach me anymore I will take it as an assault and defend myself."

The situation is spiralling. He turns and touches Naruto's cheek, encourages him to make eye contact. The second blue meets red he pushes inside.

It's dark and cold inside of Naruto’s mind, and just as soaked in iron as before. Nothing at all has changed since the day they kneeled together in front of the God tree. He moves around littered papers, careful not to step on anything, and runs towards the centre.

Cage bars go from the bloodied water up into the sky above until it goes so dark and distant that Obito cannot make out where they end, sealed shut with a scrap of paper. Behind them the Kyuubi peers out with disdain. Obito steps into the clearing and looks around - no Naruto.

"Where is he?"

"Why don't you explain to me first what it is you think you're doing by sending my partner into a den of snakes?"

He ignores the thundering rumble of anger in the Kyuubi’s voice. “Let me talk to him. Tell me where he is.”

Water splashes as the Kyuubi gets to its feet, teeth bared and shining ever-so-slightly in the dim light. “You have no place to demand anything of _me,_ ” it grumbles low in its throat. “But most of all, you have no right to demand _anything_ of Naruto. You will speak to me!”

It’s laughable, really, how high and mighty the Kyuubi holds itself when he had subjugated it like a wild animal with a collar when he was still in his teen years. “And what will you do if I don’t? Attack me? With this cage between us?”

The Kyuubi stares at him for a moment, red eyes peering at him in the dark. “You think too highly of yourself, Uchiha.”

Obito scoffs and crosses his arms. “Where is he?” he asks again. Time inside of the mindspace passes infinitely more slowly than the time in the real world, but pass it does. The quicker this can be sorted out the better it will be.

“You miserable little man. Think hard on your position - I have been with Naruto for nearly every single moment of his entire life. I know him better than I know myself. You have walked him hand in hand into a place he hates more than nearly anything else, and you above all should understand how hard of a trial it is to make my partner hate anyone or anything.” The Kyuubi sneers at him. “How eager are you to measure the importance of your presence in his life against his moral code?”

That stops him up short.

The Kyuubi, sensing a point of weakness, continues on mercilessly. “You are an enemy who has crawled its way into his life. You think you know everything, you think you know what’s _best._ You think that you can get away with anything and he will forgive you. He won’t. There is a point. You will push that point if you continue to alienate me and make decisions for him that he rejects.”

There is truth there that Obito cannot deny. He _does_ think he knows what is best - at least in this situation. He is more ruthless. He can set pieces up in such a way that Naruto never would. If they are ever to create a peaceful world, then surely Obito must help. _Surely._ And there is truth in the way the Kyuubi lords his relationship with Naruto over him. The Kyuubi knows his secrets in ways Obito could only dream of. Only _hope_ for.

Obito looks away, surrenders his greatest power. “I understand. The last thing that I want is to drive him away.”

The water ripples as the great beast lays back down slowly. “Then tell me. Why is it you have brought him to ROOT?”

“I… I thought it would be for the best this way,” Obito answers, knowing instinctively somehow that Naruto can hear him. “I know he hates how Danzou has handled his affairs. I know how much he loves that teammate of his who was forged in ROOT. With the power of my genjutsu, I can make it so Naruto has the power over ROOT instead and forge it into something he can be proud of. He can heal them as he healed me.”

“Why not tell my partner this before? You trickster Uchiha.”

Obito looks down at his reflection in the bloody water, barely able to make out his own face. “I thought it would be better this way. I thought it would be easier. I know Naruto hates ROOT. But he will be good for it. He will heal them, I am _sure_ of it.”

The Kyuubi is silent for a long while, tails swinging quietly behind it. “Finally,” it says, “you are honest. What is it with you people and being so dishonest? With yourselves, with others. Naruto is so honest it’s ugly and painful. That is what I respect about him. You would do well to learn from him.”

Obito refuses to nod, refuses to be scolded once again.

“Obito…”

His head snaps up at the soft call of his name. The older Naruto, the one he fell in love with in the God’s nightmare, walks out from behind the Kyuubi, nearly obscured in the darkness.

Obito runs towards the cage, deterred briefly by the Kyuubi’s claws sliding between the bars. “Naruto,” he says, feeling his heart pulled towards the withdrawn face gliding closer towards him. “I didn’t mean to make you feel so trapped. Please forgive me.”

Naruto stops at the edge of the bars, inside with the beast. His expression seems weighed with a deep emotion. “Do you really think I can help them?”

There’s nothing worth even considering in that question. “Yes,” he says with utmost conviction. “You have the ability to touch a person’s heart, Naruto. Believe in yourself. I’m sorry, deeply, for forcing you into this situation, but I was afraid you would turn away from them without realizing how deep their need is. They _need_ someone like you. Like I did.”

Naruto shakes his head but he steps through the bars of the cage and easily opens his arms to accept Obito’s embrace.

“... I’ll do it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so glad I got to finally have a scene to put Hinata into. I want to weave her into the story somehow, so this will be the first scene in her plot. Thank you for reading!


	6. Two truths make a lie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naruto accepts his new position, Obito worries about his choices, and Hinata makes a discovery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! Please take almost 9000 words as apology.
> 
> If you enjoy, please leave a comment!

Obito leaves the mindscape first, disappearing like mist into the darkness, his touch lingering ever so slightly.

It’s a strange feeling to have someone inside of his mind, one he hasn’t gotten used to since the first time Sasuke had pushed his way inside. It’s a tight pressure sitting right behind his eyes, and the crawling feeling like someone was watching him.

He sighs and sits in the water. Just a few moments to collect himself and he’ll go back out. Just a moment.

“That man…” Kurama growls, returning to pacing anxiously behind his cage bars. “A liar. A cheat. Accursed Uchiha...”

Naruto almost smiles listening to the rambling rant.

“Naruto,” Kurama stops, addressing him. “If you want to leave this place despite your promise just now, I’ll help you. Take my power and use it.”

Red chakra bubbles up between them, turning the water from blackened and bloodied into something red and pure, hot and steaming. It’s warmth is familiar and comforting despite the inherent rage present in the energy of it. How many times has he used this same chakra to defend himself and his friends?

But should he use it right now?

“Argh, I don’t know…! I think maybe I should stay.” Even he can hear the hesitation and doubt in his voice, but he can’t bring himself to make the decision to leave.

“You have no debts owed to this Uchiha, nor to the snake’s apprentice, nor to ROOT,” Kurama says soothingly, sensing his emotions. The red chakra reaches out to him, enveloping him like a blanket. “You have nothing to do with any of them. Involving yourself with them will only result in you diverting your gaze from other things that matter more.”

“What things?” he asks just to be difficult.

Kurama gives him a _look_ that says ‘I literally live in your mind and can pretty much figure out exactly what you’re thinking at all times’. “You _must_ look ahead towards the coming war. As long as Pein and Akatsuki are still pursuing Madara’s goals, you and the peace you hold so dear is in danger. My siblings are suffering. And most importantly, my father’s mother can still return.”

He sighs and hangs his head. He hasn’t really wanted to think about it since Obito had first arrived. Of course he knows that sooner or later he’ll have to stop playing pretend with Team 7 and the Konoha 11 and the rest of Konoha as a whole, and has been mentally preparing for it, but that doesn’t mean he wants it to happen. He _wants_ to stay with his team and see Sakura and Kakashi and _Sasuke_ safe and sound, all of the 11 alive and whole and unburdened by death and war.

But he knows it’s selfish to want to stay here and hide in the illusion that everything’s okay. He’ll have to sacrifice that desire in order to _keep_ them all safe.

“Naruto. I know you want to help Sai, but you can’t stop to help all of ROOT as well. You must focus.”

And there it is. The true reason he’s willing to swallow Obito’s deception and stay in the underbelly of Konoha despite his disgust for it. Sai is here! Sai, and maybe his brother too. It isn’t right to let them stay here when Sai is his friend and needs a way to escape this place. It’s _wrong_ to leave him here when he has a chance to help.

He remembers meeting him, almost hating him for looking like _Sasuke_ while acting so differently than him. And then there was the way he hadn’t understood what being a team means, how he’d almost betrayed them - well he _had_ , actually, but then he’d changed his mind - and Naruto remembers the little book that Sai still kept, proof that he still had a heart that could heal.

Sai is his friend, one of his precious people. Or, he _was,_ and he can be again. And maybe it’s not too late to prevent him from going cold to begin with! Maybe Naruto can get him and his brother out, and they can live normal lives!

And if he’s helping Sai, it isn’t fair to let everyone else continue to rot and suffer thanks to Danzou.

“He’s a part of Team 7 too,” Naruto says stubbornly. “He should be out of this stupid place! Everyone should! ROOT shouldn’t even exist.”

“The Uchiha - and more than likely that snake too - won’t dissolve ROOT, and they won’t sit idly by while _you_ dissolve it either,” Kurama argues. “The Uchiha wants to use ROOT, use your _friend_ and his brother. For what, I don’t know, but I can see it in his cursed eyes.”

Naruto stands at that, fists clenched tightly at his sides. “I won’t let him! If he tries, I’ll kick his ass. I’ll help them, all of them, and save them! And then they can go home to Konoha without being forced to kill their hearts!”

Kurama shakes himself and paces angrily back and forth, bumping against the cage purposefully on every turn. They stay like that for a minute, Kurama rumbling and pacing, and Naruto standing sternly against his partner’s logic.

“Fine,” Kurama says finally, with frustrated surrender clear in his voice. “I see your mind can’t be changed.”

Naruto pumps his fist. “I’m gonna help Sai! … and everyone else! Believe it!”

“Quiet down and listen to me for once. You can’t stay here forever and you can’t trust the Uchiha with it.”

Naruto just shakes his head. Kurama hates any and all Uchiha - that won’t change no matter how much Naruto argues about it. Obito has questionable methods, and he has questionable ideals, but he wants peace too so Naruto wants to rely on him. _Needs_ to rely on him.

They’re the only ones still left from the previous world. If Naruto can’t rely on him, it’ll just be him and Kurama left, and that’s just too lonely.

Kurama continues, “Save Sai. Decide who you can trust to look after ROOT in your absence, and when you are done, come back and save the rest of them. No one will be left behind, but you can prioritize. Is that enough?”

“You really don’t want her to come back, huh? I mean, I feel the same but...”

Red eyes look down at him with softness. “I don’t want you to feel afraid anymore.”

Naruto blinks and grins at the giant fox who scowls and looks away in embarrassment for being too soft. “Aww, I love you too, you big fuzzball.” He jumps over and throws his arms around one of Kurama’s legs, rubbing his face into the fur and scrubbing away the traces of happy tears that had sprung to his eyes.

A gust of wind blows over him as Kurama sighs and gently places his head next to him, surrounding him with fur and warmth. “Shut up. If I say one more pathetically sappy thing I may simply die from embarrassment.”

He nuzzles in deeper while being sharply aware of the fact that time is ticking and he needs to go. He allows himself just a moment or two longer to linger, and then he pulls away.

“... Just be safe,” Kurama says.

“I’ll try.”

With that decided, he blinks and finds himself back in the real world. Obito is staring at the three men opposite them, an orange haired man he doesn’t know, an Aburame if he had to guess, and Danzou. They’re paused in the middle of motion as though frozen in place.

“Uh,” he says and that seems to snap the strange atmosphere of the room. He focuses on Danzou and smothers his desire to punch him in the face. “Sorry for freaking out. I’m ready now.”

Danzou’s assistants seem to shiver before they blink and relax, stepping back. Obito exhales forcibly and unclenches his hands, the faint smell of blood wafting off of him. He must be using Kamui... Naruto sees Kabuto also relax just slightly as the kikaichuu retreat back towards the Aburame.

Danzou blinks hard, once, and then continues as if nothing at all had happened. “I'm glad you've decided to stop misbehaving. I have not trained you in order for you to throw it away now. Come over here so that I can key the seals on their tongues and this room to you.”

He gives Obito one last scolding _look,_ and steps forward.

Fuu moves over obediently, supplying a tag with a complex set of seals. Naruto can pick out a few of the matrices tied all up together in knots, looped into one another by a deft hand. He’s curious if it had been created by someone in ROOT itself, impressed by the handiwork. Maybe once this is said and done, he can sit down and chat with whoever it was about fuuinjutsu.

The paper is set on Danzou’s open palm and he activates it partially, the paper glowing as he holds it in stasis.

Naruto holds his hand out above it, pushes his chakra into it, meeting Danzou halfway. The ink passes out of the paper, suspended by their mixed chakra in the air, and seeps into his skin, drawing lines that disappear into nothingness. He can still feel them, though. The power they’re granting him.

“You really can’t control them anymore after this?” Naruto asks carefully, watching the fuuinjutsu to make sure there’s no trick, that he’s not binding _himself_ to Danzou.

“No,” Danzou answers gruffly. “It will be up to you to continue to prune the roots of Konoha. I expect great things of you.”

Naruto says nothing to that. He can’t hear any lies, still isn’t sure exactly what genjutsu Obito used to convince Danzou of this all, but he won’t look a gift frog in the mouth. He wants to save Sai and all the others from this man’s evil, and if this is what it takes, he can look the other way. Just this once.

The seal releases itself from the paper, floating lazily but with purpose up and around his hand, black lines sinking into his skin, and similar symbols leach out of Danzou’s skin, dissipating into thin air.

All in all, it only takes a few minutes. The ink on his skin sinks in and fades, but he can feel the weight of it.

“Let’s get this over with,” Danzou instructs gruffly. “Fuu, gather any shinobi currently present and inform them they will be meeting their new commander. Torune, stay with us.”

Fuu bows and flits away.

Danzou leads them out of the chamber, walking stiffly. He’s missing an arm, Naruto notes, wondering what had happened to cause that. He never knew the man at all during his previous life, had only learned of his many atrocities from a myriad of sources who had been done wrong by him.

Sai and Yamato, and every other person who had been touched by ROOT. Nagato and Konan and their entire country. Kabuto. _Sasuke_ and his clan.

It’s going to be a relief when he doesn’t have to see the man any more.

He follows him, Obito and Kabuto two steps behind him and Torune bringing up the rear. No one encounters them on the way back to the central area. It’s quiet as the grave.

Going from the dead calm into the opening is a bit shocking - there are nin fluttering all around, flitting into place, some with masks and some without. There are some with sleep tired eyes and some with sweat dotting their brow from training. They organize themselves in a specific order that Naruto can’t quite place.

His eyes scan over the crows with a mixture of anticipation and worry - and then his breath punches out of his chest when he sees a boy with black hair and black eyes set against pale skin, who looks young that it takes him a bit aback.

_Sai._

He’d known this was coming and still feels caught off-guard. Naruto’s eyes flick around, looking for a matching boy with silvery hair who had claimed a place as Sai’s first precious person, as his brother despite the lack of blood bonds. But he’s not here. And Sai’s eyes are dark with a brittle, subdued defeat. A kind of emptiness that leaves Naruto aching.

He regrets his decision to stay and acquiesce to Obito’s request less and less as he sees the same brittleness in the eyes of all the other young ones, and a deadened darkness in the eyes of the older ones.

The damage ROOT has left on all of these people is disgusting to him.

“This shinobi,” Danzou starts, motioning towards Naruto, “will be your new commander, effective immediately. Eventually he shall become Hokage, and it is your purpose to assist him in grooming the glorious tree of Konoha. Never forget that the roots of the tree exist in the darkness for the budding leaves.”

Naruto bites down on the inside of his cheek to stop himself from saying anything about that. Once Danzou has actually left, _then_ he can dismantle this terrible place.

And becoming Hokage? Maybe once upon a time that was his dream... Not anymore. He can’t protect the world and bring peace while chained to a desk.

The world is worth more than Konoha.

Most of the younger ones don’t even look his way, simply bowing their heads and accepting their new situation, Sai among them. They look as though they don’t even care who orders them around. They’re just empty. Some of the older ones look between themselves, suspiciously eyeing him and the two men standing behind him. They don’t speak out, though, and when Danzou glares down at them they all finally bow as well.

“I expect you all to serve Konoha well under his guidance.”

“Yes, Danzou-sama,” they echo back obediently.

“My duty here is done now,” Danzou says to him as the ROOT shinobi disperse back to their various duties. His voice sounds tired. “It’s up to you. Don’t let everything I invested into you go to waste.”

He doesn’t trust himself to not shout at the old man so he simply nods.

Fuu and Torune watch Danzou leave, looking almost lost. They were the closest to him after all. It must be hard for things to change like this.

Naruto looks back over the central area. It’s quiet, dark and cold, nothing but stone pathways arching over a long drop. It looks new and well-maintained, like it hasn’t been in use for very long. Maybe Danzou and ROOT had moved around multiple times to avoid notice and this was just their newest spot.

It doesn’t matter. This will be the last spot ROOT ever exists.

“I’m going to let them go as soon as possible,” he says even though it should be obvious. It’s the only right thing to do.

“Naruto-san,” Kabuto says passively, “I don’t believe that would be a good idea.”

Kurama rumbles in his mind and Naruto hears the warning again, that Obito and Kabuto only want to _use_ ROOT like tools. He feels a flicker of deep, raw anger. No one will hurt Sai any more, not even these two. Not even if it does come to blows.

Kabuto takes a step back, hands raised in surrender. “Hear me out!”

Naruto sets his jaw and sends Obito’s chest a warning glare when the man begins to approach him, avoiding the man’s eyes and stopping him up short. He doesn’t want to be touched right now and he _definitely_ doesn’t want Obito to just invite himself inside again.

“Shinobi raised in ROOT have difficulty returning to normal life on the surface - simply sending them off and telling them to go free will result in damages to them rather than benefits,” Kabuto explains gently. “If they no longer have a purpose - if they’re turned out against their will without a support system and believe they’ve become obsolete and useless, I believe they will either fall into service for a new master - as I once did - or they may… to put it bluntly, commit suicide.”

“Sai was okay!” Naruto argues before he remembers that Kabuto has no idea what he’s talking about.

In Kabuto’s stead, Obito picks up the argument. “Sai had you and Sakura. He had a support system in you. Without Team 7 he would never have left ROOT. Without you, he _never will._ ”

The wind blows right out of his sails at that.

 _“He will be good for it. He will heal them, I am_ sure _of it.”_

Is this what Obito had meant? Naruto hadn’t really thought of it that way. Yeah, he had somehow helped Sai break out of his conditioning, and Sakura had befriended the other boy too… But he hadn’t imagined what kind of damage it might have caused if Sai had been _forced_ to leave the only home he’d really ever known without any one to turn to. He doesn’t want to believe Sai would have gone so far as to kill himself, but he finds it scarily easy to imagine a bastard like Orochimaru picking him up and twisting him into a different shape.

But he won’t leave them this way. Even if it kills them, he can’t leave them in the dark like this.

“One step at a time,” Kabuto says calmly, skipping over the Sai discussion. “If you want rehabilitation, it won’t happen overnight. It will be a long, hard project.”

Naruto stares hard at him, watching for deception, but he still can’t sense any malice in Kabuto’s heart and he’s just not good enough to tell if he’s deceiving him or not. He wants to believe in him. He _wants_ Kabuto to actually help him save the ROOT shinobi. After all, he’d know firsthand what it’s like here - he could truly connect with them in a way Naruto can’t.

All Naruto can do is support them with all of his heart, entreat them out into the daylight, kickstart their hearts like he’d accidentally managed to do with Sai.

But… he can’t spend all of his time down here. Not forever. He and Obito have so much other business that they’ll need to attend to, and there’s nothing he can do to avoid that fact. Someday soon he’ll have to leave Konoha and ROOT and all of them behind.

Can he trust Kabuto to help them?

Kabuto tilts his head, eyes sliding away to where the ROOT nin had congregated. “Your friend Sai was here, wasn’t he? Is this… somehow before you met him?”

Obito crosses his arms and the air around him turns hostile at the endangerment of their shared secret, but Naruto doesn’t really care if Kabuto knows the truth behind them, the fact that they’re souls out of time and place.

“Yeah… He was.”

Kabuto thinks for a moment, dark eyes looking over the innards of ROOT where they stand before turning his thoughtful gaze onto him. “I don’t know what it is you’re planning to do. I won’t ask. But you will be important to ROOT. I think you can make a difference here, not just for your friend, but for all of them. Even if you cannot waste your time here, too busy with your other plans, please allow me to continue this work in your stead.”

Wow. Does he broadcast his thoughts that loudly? Or is Kabuto just that sharp?

“I… have a lot of things I have to do, yeah,” he admits. “I want them to be okay. Sai is one of my important people so of course I want to help him! And everyone else here! But I don’t have _time_ -”

He cuts himself off when he feels his eyes start burning with the unfairness of it all.

“That’s why I’m saying I’ll help you,” Kabuto smiles warmly. Naruto feels a little dazed all over again like he had been earlier. He feels at ease when Kabuto looks at him that way, like his problems aren’t so heavy for just a moment. “I’ll be here in your stead, guiding them towards the light slowly. I understand how they think, how they’re trained. I believe I can possibly get through to them with enough time, if that’s not too presumptuous of me.”

He doesn’t look at Obito to see what he thinks about Kabuto’s offer - he probably would refuse, say that Kabuto can’t be trusted, that Naruto is the one he’d chosen to help them. And that’s the problem. Naruto didn’t want this. Obito decided _for_ him.

This decision is his to make alone.

“... Okay,” he says. If he says Kabuto is his friend, he has to put his money where his mouth is. “I’ll trust you to help me with them.”

Kabuto’s face brightens in a way that _can’t_ be fake.

Naruto looks away, hoping to see Sai again somehow even though he’s long gone by now, back to whatever tiny dark cubby hole they’ve got him stuck in.

He doesn’t see Obito and Kabuto exchange secretive nods of approval.

They head home deep into the night and Naruto falls asleep the second he touches the covers, completely exhausted.

* * *

Father had been upset at her for coming home slightly past curfew. She’d known she’d waited too long looking for Naruto, but who could blame her for being worried? He hadn’t shouted at her, of course he hadn’t, it would have been improper for him to raise his voice in the view of the branch family, but he had scolded her with cutting words. _That_ she could handle. But then he’d made her spar with Hanabi-chan and Neji-nii-san until she was bruised all over and absolutely humiliated by just how badly she’d done.

When all was said and done and she’d been allowed to go, she’d cried herself to sleep, wishing that Mother was alive to stroke her hair and whisper kind things in her ear.

Still, she gets up in the morning after and brushes her own hair and makes sure that her eyes aren’t red and there are no shadows under them. She has something she needs to do before she meets with her team.

She sneaks into the kitchens in the branch house building, dips her head nervously back to the branch members when they bow, and she politely takes something to eat for breakfast. She hates eating with Father and Hanabi-chan most days, preferring to sneak something from the branch house while they make some simple food for themselves. It seems most days that her absence isn’t even noticed.

That’s alright. She doesn’t need to be noticed. It suits her to stay quiet in the background.

She leaves after her quiet breakfast, slipping out of the compound through one of the side exits used for accepting in shipments of produce for the branch family kitchens. One of the guards bows deeply to her as she walks by. She nods back as is proper, fingers toying with one another in front of her like a barrier between them.

Thankfully, Neji-nii-san hadn’t been home. Ever since he’d been promoted to genin, he’d been leaving at outrageously early hours to meet with his team. She’d met them once, and had promptly fainted when a boy in a green jumpsuit had gotten very close to her, speaking very quickly with a sparkling sunset appearing in the background.

They were nice.

And it’s not as though she dislikes seeing Neji, but… It’s just hard.

She shakes off her depressing thoughts. It’s a wonderful day out. The sky is as blue and bright as Naruto-kun’s curious, friendly eyes. … That thought embarrasses her somewhat and she looks back at the ground, ears going warm.

It’s been awhile since she last saw him properly. They used to be in class together everyday but now… She misses him.

She wonders not for the first time how different her life would be right now if she had been placed on a team with Naruto-kun instead of Kiba and Shino.

She doesn’t dislike her team at all, of course - she appreciates Kiba’s enthusiasm in a similar way to how she likes Naruto-kun’s out-going behaviour, and Akamaru is adorable. Shino is quiet like she is, but he can still voice his opinion without stuttering or feeling awkward. She wishes she could do that. And Kurenai-sensei is very smart and capable! Father had been wary of her, speaking down at her lack of experience as a jounin, but Hinata knows that Kurenai-sensei is skilled. All you need to do is watch her disarm an argument between the boys, or see one of her illusions, and then you’ll understand that she earned her jounin placement.

But still… With Naruto-kun at her side, maybe she could be improving faster. Maybe she’d be able to speak her mind with him supporting her. Maybe if he cheered her on, she could stand up to her father, or at least be able to take on Hanabi or Neji-nii-san without freezing up.

Instead, he’s on a team with _his_ crush. Hinata’s never really known what to think of Sakura. She likes how strong-willed the other girl is, admires that she seems to always know what she wants and how to get it. But she’s weak, weaker than her, even. And she _hates_ Naruto… How anyone could hate him, she simply can’t understand.

During her years of admiring Naruto-kun, she’s noticed that so very many people in the village dislike him. Even Kou… Back then, when Naruto-kun had saved her, Kou had looked at the bruised boy with disgust, pulled her away as though Naruto would make her dirty just by standing near him. Shinobi avoid him, and the civilians are cruel. Never violent - at least not that she ever saw - but cold, distant. They’d say mean things and maybe swat at him if he bumped into them, upcharge him at stores, and do anything to make him feel unwelcomed.

If she was brave, she’d go up to him and hug him and say nice things and make sure he didn’t have to feel lonely.

But she’s not brave.

So instead she just watches him from afar like a coward, silently cheering him on.

A few minutes later she finds herself approaching his apartment complex and activates her Byakugan quietly, nervous that her family may see her and accuse her of misusing her eyes. No one confronts her, however, and so she hovers by a fence, hiding behind it as she looks up.

“Th-thank goodness,” she sighs to herself, feeling all of the tension nearly slide out of her body.

Naruto’s chakra is there, dim and calm as it is when he sleeps. She’d seen him snooze in class often enough to know how it looks. There’s something under the sleepy blue, too, that catches her eye, a tinge of red roiling around. That’s new. She wonders if it has something to do with what happened last night.

The hovering shadows are still there too. They’re different than they were before, but still about the same levels of strength.

And then there’s the other person. The one who’d manifested into the room. They’re resting next to Naruto-kun… In the same _bed._ She flushes and covers her eyes uselessly, Byakugan still staring up at the strange sight.

Before now, the only person she’d ever seen in Naruto’s apartment was the Sandaime, and this signature _definitely_ doesn’t belong to the Hokage. In fact, the signature is quite unlike most people she’s seen. The network of tenketsu is snarled up on the right side, somewhat obscured by Naruto’s figure, but she can tell that it’s been damaged.

And their head… It’s bright, the chakra flaring out in what she assumes must be use, and the network is highly complex. It reminds her of her family a bit. The doujutsu they have requires more chakra to feed it meaning there are more channels leading to their eyes. So that must mean this unknown person has a doujutsu too.

Then why is the network in their head twice as complex as any Byakugan user she’s ever seen?

She’s aware there are other doujutsu in the world, but not in Konoha. The only other doujutsu had been the Sharingan, but she’s never seen them in real life. By the time she’d really been allowed to mingle with the outside world, they’d all died, and Sasuke didn’t have them. He has the groundwork for them laid out, yes, but they’ve never been active like this person’s are.

It’s equal parts entrancing… and deeply worrying. Questions spiral in her mind. Who is this unknown person? What kind of eye powers do they have? Why are they in bed with Naruto…?

Should she tell someone?

She hesitates as she always does. If Naruto-kun finally found someone to care for him, who is she to get in the way?

Her Byakugan powers down and she bows her head, poking her fingers together nervously. It wouldn’t be right to tell anyone. She was spying on him like some sort of stalker anyways, so it would be like telling someone Naruto’s secrets without his knowledge or permission.

As she turns away to head to her team’s training spot, a voice calls out to her.

“Oh, is that you, Hinata?”

A look over her shoulder confirms it’s Ino, as loud and confident as ever. Hinata could never raise her voice like that. She stops and smiles anxiously at the other girl, suddenly feeling guilty like Ino had caught her red handed peeking on Naruto.

“U-Um… Hi, Ino,” she stammers.

“I knew it was you!” Ino beams. “Where are you off to? How’s your team doing? What’s your sensei like? Is it a man? Are they hot? Oh, did you get any breakfast yet? I was just heading to grab some for my team too before we start missions for the day and you can come with me if you want.”

Hinata’s head spins with the rapid-fire questions. She pokes her fingertips together more forcefully, pulling her shoulders up. “I… Um… My team is well. Kurenai-sensei is very strong an-and kind.” She flushes when she thinks about whether or not Kurenai-sensei is _hot_ so she doesn’t answer that question. “I-I ate… at home…”

“Aw, too bad,” Ino pouts a little, plush lips pursing. “I was hoping we could catch up.”

“M... Maybe another time,” Hinata offers weakly.

“Okay, let’s meet up sometime soon then,” Ino grins brightly. Then she looks thoughtfully around with a sharp glean in her eyes and Hinata feels immediately defensive. “Hm… Y’know, I could swear Naruto lives around here somewhere.”

Hinata sweats, feeling a little faint. “D-Does… h-he…? I-I don’t… Um…”

The other girl leans in secretively, a slender brow raised. “Are you hanging around here for some reason in particular? Maybe… to see him?”

Her tone sounds a little teasing, but Hinata can tell she knows what she’s saying. Ino’s always been eerily good at knowing people’s business. She bites her lip and looks down, retreating further into her oversized coat.

“Don’t be shy! I think it’s kinda cute, you following him around like a little lovestruck puppy.” Ino looks sly, grinning mischievously. “I hear now’s a good time to get a move on - he’s gotten over his crush on Sakura which means he’s free real estate!”

Hinata’s eyes flicker up to his apartment, not feeling particularly surprised or happy about the news. After all, he has someone in bed with him, and it certainly isn’t Sakura.

Ino winks dramatically. “Good luck! Let’s meet up again sometime and I’ll give you some good tips on winning a guy over!” And with that she’s off, long hair bouncing behind her.

Hinata stares at the ground for awhile until she stops feeling like she’ll faint if she moves, then heads back to her team’s training grounds. She’s got a strange, hot feeling in her stomach that feels a little something like anger, but she doesn’t know why exactly.

All she knows is she wants to punch something until her hand bleeds.

* * *

Obito scans the room again, feeling his itching sense of paranoia fading. Someone had been watching him. Somehow, someway, eyes had been on him and Naruto and he can’t tell from where.

Is it Zetsu, come to find out where his pet Uchiha has run off to? His information gathering and stalking abilities are nearly incomparable; it wouldn’t be unimaginable for Zetsu to have snuck in under Obito’s watch. Although that wouldn’t explain why he hadn’t revealed himself and ordered Obito to return to his normal duties.

The ANBU outside are irritating but harmless. Even the most astute among them wouldn’t be able to see through his illusions, especially not now, not with the influence of Kotoamatsukami’s power.

That doesn’t leave him with many options as to who it could be. There’s no one who should have any reason to be watching Naruto, and no one who should have any knowledge of his presence. The only one who knows he’s here is Yakushi, but he and the little snake had come to a surprisingly agreeable accord when they’d crafted their plan to conquer and corrupt ROOT from the inside out.

He still doesn’t trust Yakushi. But his words about being seen, about feeling as though he can never return to being the human being he had been before… Obito understands it deeply. The look in their eyes must be the exact same. Nothing but a pair of bloodied tools in Naruto’s clean hands.

The plan had gone nearly without a hitch, too. A very rare thing indeed. Naruto had been upset at first, naturally, but he’d agreed in the end to become ROOT’s figurehead in order to heal the broken shinobi inside.

He’s almost impressed at how easily the spy got Naruto to agree to leave him unsupervised among them. He supposes that this is the downside to Naruto’s deeply trusting nature. In this case, it’s a good thing though. Soon, they’ll reforge every last tool in ROOT into perfect little shields to keep his precious sunlight safe.

Naruto won’t forgive them if he ever finds out. Obito understands that well. Using someone as a tool is the most vile thing one can do in his eyes, and they’ve brought him into ROOT, lied to him, all for the purpose of using those broken shinobi that hide underground.

But to protect him… anything is worth it.

_“If I didn’t try to understand you, I’d never be able to find the path towards peace.”_

Those are Naruto’s words. The words that had convinced him to go along with Yakushi’s idea to begin with. The idea that perhaps Naruto could see into his heart and unravel the knotted mess and understand why he would do these awful things for him.

Then again, the Kyuubi had said that if it came down to it, if he strained Naruto’s patience and forgiveness too far, Naruto may finally push him away.

_“How eager are you to measure the importance of your presence in his life against his moral code?”_

Obito isn’t sure enough of his presence in Naruto’s life to be eager to make that gamble, and yet he’d done it anyway.

He needs Naruto. Kabuto had nailed it right on the head - he _loves_ Naruto deeply, so deeply it reminds him frighteningly of his decades long obsession with Rin’s ghost. But… there’s a difference between them. Naruto isn’t dead. He’s warm and alive in his arms _right now._ He has a _chance._ And this time, no matter what, he won’t let the light of his life die, not if he can help it.

He’ll suffer unimaginably if Naruto rejects him. But as long as he can live in the same world that Naruto does, know that he’s safe, then he can live without his touch. He’ll willingly suffer a cursed, damned existence as long as it means Naruto can live.

There’s no going back anymore. He’s made his decisions. All that’s left is to wait.

The sunlight in the room grows stronger as the sun makes its way further into the sky, the light crawling across the room, creeping its way across the bed. Naruto will wake soon.

He’s snoozing lightly in his embrace, hair mussed and face nuzzled into his fake arm. Obito’s taken to this position well - his right arm doesn’t need blood flow, so it doesn’t bother him, and it leaves his good arm free to run his fingers through the blonde hair or to trace a finger over the whisker-like scars. Naruto sleeps surprisingly soundly too, not kicking or rolling, like he wants to stay in Obito’s embrace.

A swell of emotion rises in Obito’s chest so forcefully at the thought that he can’t breathe past it for a moment. If Naruto doesn’t forgive him, doesn’t allow him to stay at his side, he’ll lose this.

But how can he be blamed for wanting to protect someone this precious?

Obito forces himself to breathe again, calming the raging, terrified thoughts spiraling through his head.

One step at a time.

“You okay?” his salvation asks sleepily, looping an arm over him and snuggling into their hug further.

“I’m alright,” Obito lies soothingly, petting Naruto’s hair and encouraging him to nuzzle into his chest. He won’t illuminate Naruto on his problems. That’s the very last thing he wants to do. “I woke you up?”

“Mm… I felt your negative emotions.”

Damn. “I’m alright. I’m just worried about a few things.”

“It’s all going to be fine,” Naruto declares with determination. Obito dearly hopes it will be.

They get up not long after, although Obito wishes that they could stay together in bed all day, holding one another comfortingly. He keeps Naruto as close as he can for as long as he can, enjoying the soothing warmth. Sadly he had put an end to sitting on Obito’s lap, but agreeably holds his hand throughout his morning routine.

Once he leaves, Obito puts his thoughts back towards whoever was surveilling them.

Not Zetsu - or at the very least, not _likely_ Zetsu. Not the ANBU; if it were he’s sure they would have attempted his arrest already. And if it’s not him they’re watching for, he’s not sure who among the populace in Konoha would have reason to watch Naruto’s apartment except for Kakashi. And while he is certainly a very skilled shinobi - that, Obito will admit - Kakashi doesn’t have the sorts of surveillance tactics he’d need in order to watch Obito without being noticed himself.

That leaves…

The Sandaime.

He remembers in his childhood, following Minato into the Sandaime’s office, seeing a small crystal ball there. He’d made a stupid comment about the Sandaime being a fortune teller, and the old man had laughed and said _Not quite._ Is it possible the Professor of Shinobi has a technique that actually allows him to see through it?

He manifests the Mangekyou Sharingan in his eyes and feels Kotoamatsukami awake inside of the left eye.

Perhaps it’s time to visit the old man and put a firm end to any meddling in their lives.

* * *

Kakashi rubs his nose irritably for the hundredth time that morning. Naruto had shown up smelling unnaturally strongly of perfume, sheepishly saying he’d forgotten to wash his jacket again and made up for it with the first thing he could think of. It smells absolutely awful to Kakashi’s strong sense of smell.

Haruno had actually complimented him about it while he tried to stave off a headache.

He sets them back onto their sparring, or tree-walking attempts in the Uchiha’s case, and settles back in the shade to wait and watch.

It’s only an hour later that Kakashi sees a hawk with a thin white band on its ankle spiral above Team 7’s training grounds, followed by the ANBU team slowly retreating. He waits, but no team replaces them.

The hawk is the main method of messaging that the village uses, and typically the coloured bands tied on one of the bird’s feet indicates who the message is for, and what it means. The white band is for ANBU, and the spiralling formation the bird flew in the air is distinctly for “mission completed, dismissed”.

He waits a minute longer before summoning his pack.

“Yo, Kakashi,” Pakkun greets, raising a paw in greeting before recoiling and snuffling his nose. “What the hell is that smell?”

Kakashi sighs and gestures towards Naruto.

Pakkun and the other dogs give the boy a disgruntled look. “Yeesh… I can barely smell myself over that crap.”

The Uchiha barely spares a glance their way before going back to his tree-walking efforts, but both Haruno and Naruto stop their half-hearted sparring to head over to him.

“What’s up, sensei?” Naruto asks, eyeing the dogs who wander away from him.

He shrugs dismissively, pocketing his Icha Icha. “Ahh, I’m getting bored of this book. I think I’m going to run to the bookstore and get something a little spicier to read.”

Naruto raises a brow in disbelief. “You’ve been reading that book non-stop and _now_ you’re bored with it? Can’t you wait until later? Like maybe after you teach us something useful. Or like, maybe get us a mission or something… Seriously, this is so boring.”

The girl almost begins nodding before she catches herself and smacks Naruto lightly for talking back.

“Nope,” Kakashi replies simply.

He’s not taking another mission until he feels completely sure that everything is back to normal and Sensei’s son is safe. On a mission, even a D-rank, his attention is partially taken up by the other two students, the mission itself, and the customer. Here he can ostensibly say he’s training all of them without ever taking his eye off Naruto.

“Pakkun, everyone, keep watch here until I get back.”

Pakkun gives him a small salute while the others nod or bark.

* * *

Naruto stares at the empty spot where Kakashi just was, leaves fluttering down dramatically in his absence. The porn excuse is just that; a flimsy excuse for Kakashi to leave. He’d bet Gama-chan on him actually leaving because the ANBU all up and left too. “So… What now?”

Sakura grimaces and crosses her arms in front of herself. “No more sparring. I’ve had enough sparring with you!”

“Agreed…”

They stand there awkwardly as the dogs snuffle around and leap into watchful positions nearby. Sakura looks at Pakkun from the corner of her eyes once, then twice, and finally blurts out, “Do you really use the same shampoo I do?”

* * *

Kakashi pops in through the open window to the Hokage’s office, lazily saluting him and the assorted ANBU lingering in the shadows. “Yo, Hokage-sama.”

“Kakashi-kun,” Sandaime-sama smiles genially at him. He puts the ink brush down and picks up his pipe, the faintest edge of confusion lingering on his face as he gestures Kakashi closer. “I’d have thought you’d be with your team. Is there something you need?”

“I noticed Naruto’s guard taking off. Waited for the replacements but they didn’t show. Either ANBU is getting sloppy -” The shadows in the office twitch at the jab. Their emotional training must be slipping under the new commander. “- or no replacement was scheduled. Whichever it is, I’m hoping you can -”

“There was no replacement scheduled,” Hokage-sama interrupts, puffing out some smoke.

“Ah… When can a new roster get put together?”

The elderly man chuckles and waves his hand gently. “There won’t be any need for that. I think a few days of observation is satisfactory. Nothing out of the ordinary has been reported by any of our teams, so I found it prudent to reassign manpower.”

Kakashi must have heard that wrong. “It hasn’t even been a week, sir.”

“Yes, I’m not quite that senile yet,” Hokage-sama laughs. “I know how long it’s been.”

Kakashi blinks a few times and resists the urge to shake his head in confusion. This doesn’t make any sense. Unless... “Has there been information found about the masked man?”

If they had found the man’s identity, or otherwise been able to put a lock on him - perhaps Jiraiya-sama’s spy network had been able to provide a clue to his whereabouts - then Kakashi could possibly see the lack of need of protection. If there is no enemy, then there need be no guard.

“Unfortunately no.”

“... Excuse me for speaking out of turn, sir, but I can’t understand the decision to remove Naruto’s watch if the enemy who kidnapped him is still at large and unidentified.”

“As I said, there has been no indication of further contact, and there are other issues to have ANBU attend to.” Kakashi fights back his incredulity as his commander-in-chief turns back to his paperwork. “Anything else, Kakashi-kun?”

“May I speak freely?” he asks, unable to keep the tension from his voice.

Sandaime-sama looks back up at him and sighs before motioning to the guards behind him who slip away in the shadows. With a hand sign, he touches his desk and seals the room for privacy. “You may now speak.”

“This is ridiculous,” he says outright. “You know as well as I that man could have come from Iwa. Sensei’s son was born with a thousand enemies and now one of them is here and we don’t see the need to keep a protective detail on him?”

It’s next to treasonous how openly he’s questioning the Hokage’s directives, but he can’t sit back in silence on this.

Hokage-sama smokes thoughtfully for a minute, watching the plumes of grey rise up to the ceiling before responding. “Born with a thousand enemies… And yet, his whole life, have we not stood aside? For the express purpose of ensuring those enemies don’t know who he is?”

“And it didn’t _work_ ,” Kakashi reminds him. The bitterness in his voice is almost tangible.

“We don’t know that. If that man isn’t from Iwa, then bringing more attention to the issue might cause them to actually take note of it. The older Naruto gets, the more alike the Yondaime he becomes in looks. We cannot afford to take risks here.”

“We are taking a risk every second he isn’t protected! Let’s say the masked man isn’t from Iwa, then what about Naruto’s status as Jinchuuriki?”

“What about it?” Sandaime-sama asks, brow raised.

“It’s an open secret.” And if Kakashi could get away with throttling the Sandaime for letting the information out to the public, he would. His sensei had honourable intentions when he wanted the village to honour his son as a hero, as he rightfully should be, but it would never happen. “It would be easy for other villages to learn of his prisoner, and scope out how easy it would be to get their hands on him.”

“If that were a concern, he would have been taken long ago.” The nonchalance in the Hokage’s voice is as shocking as it is disturbing.

Kakashi takes a moment to calm himself before he can speak again. “ _Regardless_ , I think it’s clear he’s in danger from _someone_ , and we need to treat the situation as such. If there is a shortage of manpower in Black Ops -” something he doubts intensely but isn’t brave enough to question outloud “- then allow me to recruit some jounin or chuunin that I trust, just to keep an eye on him.”

“No.”

“I - sir?”

Hokage-sama taps the ash out of his pipe and lays it down on his desk. “You are letting your personal feelings guide your judgement.” Kakashi opens his mouth to defend himself but he is spoken over. “I have been doing this much longer than you. Naruto has been safe for twelve years, and safe he shall remain, and you will not presume to know better than I on this subject. Understood?”

The hard look in the Hokage’s eyes and the steel in his voice makes Kakashi bow obediently and say, “Understood.”

“You may leave.” And with that, the seals are released and the shadows of the ANBU slip back inside.

He steps out of the Hokage’s office and stares at the wall for a moment, stunned.

Then he feels angry.

He leaps out of the closest window and heads to a place he hasn’t been in many years - the ANBU dormitories, located in a nondescript building between a dango shop and a civilian owned cafe. Under the city sprawls a network of tunnels and rooms, hidden from prying eyes where the Black Ops rest between jobs.

Unknown to Kakashi, underneath _that_ is an entirely different labyrinth of halls and rooms where a supposedly defunct ROOT still operates.

He loops around the store in a pattern that responds to his shoulder tattoo before the entrance opens and allows him in. Some masked faces turn to look at him as he heads in. He recognizes and nods to a few of them and they nod back, holding back some of the newbies from stopping him.

Time to find his little kitty cat.

He rounds the corner into the next bland hallway lined with dorm doors and comes to a stop in front of one just as identical to the next. Without knocking he heads in.

It’s just as spartan as he remembers, save for a few plants here and there looking to be in various degrees of health. A small dresser and desk, a tiny nook of a bathroom, and a twin sized bed pushed against the wall with a lump under the blankets.

“Yo, Tenzou.”

The lump on the bed shuffles around and a small slit in the blankets opens. Two black eyes blink against the light. “... Senpai?” the lump asks.

“Still asleep at this time of day?” Kakashi needles, checking his wrist as if he has a watch.

Tenzou groans and pushes the blankets off his head. “I just got off duty.”

“What did you do to this poor plant?” He pokes at the dry, crumbling leaves of a small shrub-like plant on the dresser.

Tenzou sighs and gets out of bed, convinced that he’s not going to be getting any sleep while Kakashi’s hanging around. “Apparently people think that if one of their plants is dying, putting it in my room will magically heal it.” He pokes the plant and its leaves turn green again. “... They’re not completely wrong, but it’s getting annoying. They shouldn’t get plants they can’t take care of,” he huffs.

“Were you on guard duty for Uzumaki Naruto today?” No more beating around the proverbial and literal bush.

Tenzou gives him a sour look. “I can’t tell you what I was doing. It’s bad enough you’re down here.”

Kakashi’s eye narrows and he dusts off his captain voice. “Tenzou. Tell me.”

For once he’s thankful for the undue amount of respect that some of his old kouhai still have for him because Tenzou only hesitates a second or two more before breaking. “Fine. I was watching him from approximately 2200 last night until I was dismissed about half an hour ago. I’ve been on his detail every moment for the past few days except for when I’m asleep, basically.”

“Did you notice anything, _anything_ , out of the ordinary?”

Tenzou narrows his eyes and flickers a look over Kakashi’s shoulder at the closed door. In a softer voice, he asks, “What’s going on, senpai?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling. Naruto was kidnapped only _four_ days ago, returned without any ransom or indication of who took him, and now Hokage-sama is removing his guard detail with no notice.”

“Removing it? No one relieved us?” Tenzou puts a hand to his chin. “It _was_ weird to see the hawk, now that you mention it. But what does that mean? Why is it so bad?”

“You know what Naruto is.”

Tenzou looks away at the plants. “Yeah. That’s why I’ve been shadowing him. Usually I’d be doing something else, maybe border patrol or an S-rank, but they put me on his detail just in case it had something to do with… that. The Kyuubi.”

Kakashi pauses before continuing slowly, hoping his faith isn’t misplaced. “Hokage-sama says they don’t know who took him or why. His reasoning for removing the guards didn’t… seem to add up to me. He’s convinced that having the guard detail will draw unwanted attention. Or at least that’s what he’s saying.”

“Are you saying Hokage-sama lied?” Tenzou hisses incredulously.

“What I’m saying is that if the danger is not coming from outside of Konoha, to the point where Hokage-sama feels comfortable letting Naruto wander around freely and unguarded, then… The danger must be coming from inside.”

Tenzou’s hand raises reflexively to his mouth. Without a word, he opens his mouth and shows his tongue, blocky ink still staining the back of it all these years later.

Kakashi nods.

“... Would Hokage-sama really allow that to happen?” Tenzou asks quietly.

He doesn’t know how to answer. Everything ingrained in him wants to believe the best of Konoha, to trust in the Hokage - his life has been defined by this village. Rin died to protect it. So did Minato-sensei. Who is he to doubt and question the village they believed so deeply in?

At the same time, he must admit that blind idealism never appealed to him. Kakashi may break rules to defend his comrades but he knows realistically if you stick your head out too far, you get it cut off.

If it comes down to it, will he protect Naruto from Konoha itself?

“Just keep an eye out,” Kakashi says finally. “Don’t get yourself into trouble.”

He waits until Tenzou nods to leave. That’s one more set of eyes he can trust watching. He’s hesitant to bring this to Gai as well, or some of his other jounin connections, unsure of how closely his known companions will be watched by the Hokage or ROOT, but at least with Tenzou he can be sure Naruto won’t vanish into Konoha’s roots without _someone_ noticing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hopefully Naruto, Kabuto, and Obito's reasoning for their actions all make sense. I tried to make it clear...  
> Obito: terrified of losing Naruto's friendship, MORE terrified of him dying.  
> Kabuto: wants to brainwash all of ROOT to protect Naruto and serve him (because he believes Naruto is going to become a great leader)  
> Naruto: just wants to help UNbrainwash them
> 
> I wanted to include Sai's brother but this suits the story better so. Maybe in another fic!
> 
> Hinata's character took a strange turn, but it felt natural when I was writing it... I wonder where her character will go now! I'm excited to find out. Ino is fun to write as always too. I was going to include a scene with her and Team 10 but things were getting too bloated so maybe next chapter I'll include it.
> 
> I really wanted to have Kakashi go talk to Gai, because I like him a lot, but Yamato is thematically more suited to ROOT recon. And I like him too anyways so :p 
> 
> Again, please leave a comment telling me if you enjoyed! I'll try not to take as long again.


End file.
